This video describes the process of using feathers and wedges to split stone, a granite block in this case. Feathers and wedges are also commonly called "plugs and feathers".
Morgan help him with a song something like "My buddy Morgan" he lives just down the road. He`s a wizard with the ducks, He just hates hound hunting fucks, And we make the world a beeeeetter place.
These are 1/2" wedges, this material splits pretty easily so the smaller wedges work well. I will be getting bigger wedges for bigger blocks eventually.
That was a very distinct change in tone, once it was about to split. Quite interesting! Love seeing this kind of work. Greeting from Germany and good luck with your new channel!
When I took a rock and wood sculpting art course when I went to Castleton College they actively taught the double-tapping as a good practice for helping line up the chisels and increasing the bite of them. That said, that was down in West Rutland where it's mostly Marble - they had some Granite cuts around, but they didn't let students work them for that course specifically because of how bad the silica dust can get.
Great Video! Thanks for the demonstration. My grandfather was a stone mason from Germany. In the 30's he worked on the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale. I have a 20" round stone that is full of red garnet. I was thinking of using a diamond saw to cut around the circumference to try to split it. I'm thinking now to get a set of feathers and wedges and trying that instead.
Great to see these artisan techniques in action. I saw a 6th cent. BC marble quarry on Naxos years ago with marks in the stone just like the ones left by your feathers and wedges. Now I know how they did it!
They way Alfred is so matter of fact and understated and the way Morgan blabs on and on! You guys must be hysterical working together! Loving the video!
When that stone split, I let out a "wow!" Cool to see the subtle techniques you use, such as placing a small stone to act as a fulcrum when prying the two halves apart to retrieve your feathers and wedges.
i wish i could have seen these vids a year ago - together with a contractor buddy of mine with an excavator we installed 100 linear feet of salvaged granite curbstone in my front landscape, and some of this stone dressing action would have been great to know.
watching this vid was not only educational, but also sooo meditative. the sounds were so soothing and relaxing and I think it really must be such a satisfaction, when you start to hear those subtle cracks before finally the split opens up. and it is just so amazing to see, what one guy with a drill and a hammer can do - without any heavy machinery, destroying all the area around. Really looking forward to many more videos from you 😊
You can really tell that Alfred got more comfortable with the camera around the 3 minute mark, which was cool to see. By the end he was a natural! I gasped when the stone split. It was super interesting to learn how to hear when that was going to happen, but I was expecting the split to be less dramatic than that. It was so cool!
The double tapping provides a perfect rhythm with the music you chose. Listening to you strike the fetters and wedges was so soothing and I could actually hear the changes in the sounds as the stone got closer to breaking the final sound was magical. I have always loved the end products of stone work, but I have never seen and heard it done before. To be honest I thought it took tremendous brute strength and ugly sounds. But seeing you work, I see nothing but artistry and music. There seems to be almost the need to feel a oneness with the stone. It was very inspiring. I wish that I was young and healthy, I would love to cut the stones for my own raised garden beds myself. I do some wood carvings and turning and it requires the same meditative approach. Sometimes as I am working, it feels like my hands are smarter than my head. As if my hands became one with the wood and knew how to bring the final desired shape out of the wood without forcing the wood. I know that that sounds crazy, but it’s just what I experience when I am working. When I look at the final product I feel such awe, because I know that I have just created something far beyond my own skills. I feel a relationship with the finished product that is worth more than any amount of money and so am I never willing to sell my work. It would be like selling my children. Thank you so much. This video was both very enlightening and very very satisfying. May God always bless the work of your hands Alfred.
Love it Alfred! Keep it up, can’t wait to see you build the Vermont hobbit hideaway….. I have always wondered how they built castles and those stone walls!! I mean pretty much anything stone
My impression is that part of the hammer drills advantage is it’s rotation which helps clear the face of the hole of cuttings, leading to a cleaner strike. By hand, your chisel is often striking cuttings within the hole. In my business we typically use water or mud (a slurry really) to clean cuttings from the hole and cool the bit.
I'm pretty sure you're correct, after rotating the bit it would take a couple strikes to get through the resulting dust before I was hitting stone again. I need to get compressed air up there for a variety of reasons, but in this case it would have been helpful to clear the hole. I assume you drill wells of some type?
Good luck Alfred with your new quarry. I look forward to watching you do your thing! This may sound weird but I do stained glass and your splitting the granite seemed as satisfying as scoring and breaking a piece of glass. When it goes just right there is relief and gets the creative juices flowing. Is that sort of how you feel in your work?
Fascinating Alford ! Very artistic. Never knew what and how a piece of granite turned into a beautiful piece of work and what all would be involved in starting it.
Just came over from gold shaw farm. This is so interesting. That was so cool listening and watching you crack apart that huge rock. The littlest things in life could be so peaceful to watch and hear. It's pretty neat for me to listen to it because I'm supposed to wear hearing aids , and I don't lol but when I'm watching this I wear my earbuds and I can hear the rock and everything crack and it's so cool to hear those sounds . The littlest things in life huh lol Thank you for sharing your video, I'm looking forward to watching more.🤗
That was delightful to watch! The crunchy sound the stone made just before falling open was awesome. I was worried the side closest to you was going to fall onto your feet, so I was surprised to see how little any of it moved. Is there a way to predict how pieces will settle once they come free? I could listen to all these sounds for a long time. Very cool to hear how they change.
You get a sense of what they will do once they split. You can also generally hear the stone get ready to go, when it starts sounding hollow it's time to inventory your fingers and toes, then make sure that they are in a safe place
Heya Alfred! Thanks for the video and also from all of us in the gold Shaw farm youtube family we wish you they best of luck on all your future endeavors and also those bucket list things you wanna get too!
My dad needed to fragment a huge flat bolder so he could move it to make way for a new garden. He had watched his father split a large stone with a half stick of dynamite. They used a chisel to bore a hole and packed the dynamite with clay. My grandfather lit the fuse and casually stepped back a few steps while my grandmother freaked out. They barely heard the thud and the stone split nicely. So my father resolved to do the same to split his boulder. After we finished boring the hole with a chisel, my dad was unable to procure any dynamite. Times change. I still have the boulder with the bore hole and I'm going to keep it. All this came to mind while I watched you split that stone. I wondered if you ever work with low explosives in your stone work?
I cannot tell you how much I appreciated your video today. I live a bit west of Vermont (Nebraska), but north of us is a stone called Sioux Quartzite, or the old name is jasper. It's a beautiful red color with flecks of red in it, a beautiful stone, and like the granite you're working with, a granular igneous stone. In the older parts of Midwestern towns you would often come across a house using stone blocks just slightly thicker than bricks and otherwise similar dimensions to construct the house, or the garden wall, or the curb, etc, and I always wondered how the blocks were constructed, since they didn't have a sawn surface, but had a more natural face. I'm pretty confident that those stones, from the 1890's-1930's, were probably created using a similar technique to the one you demonstrated today. Thank you for answering a 50ish year old curious question. :)
I only knew about breaking stone underground in the mines of the Porcupine Mining Camp (Ontario Canada) using all sizes and types of hydraulic rock breakers...stone masonery is something that that I was always interested me.
Wow I found a old tin with 7 wedges like those. I really thought they were old ship/ home building nails. Seen such used as nails.. Being by a river that use to have ships. But there also was logging and quarries.
Wow your skills are amazing 😄 you’ve def got a skill most people do not and alot of those skills as we know are being lost. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, now go far and dream big and I cannot wait to watch this quarry unfold😍
I find that a magnetic retrieval tool that fits in whatever hole size you are using is good to have on hand when doing this. If a feather or wedge drops in a hole it makes it really easy to get it back out. It would have been handy to get all the pieces out of the crack at the end.
Very nicely done video. We are looking forward to many more. That was very informative and so interesting. We are located in the flint hills of Kansas. We have so many beautiful rocks here too. Thank You! We are subscribers now.
This is one of my favourite videos on granite splitting. Music , footage, the way you speak , everything is very educative and inspiring . Congratulations! .. I'm gonna buy a set of 1/2 " feathers and wedges to start cutting granite at my homestead up here in the Serra da Mantiqueira, Brazil's southeast . Just two questions : How long does it take to drill each of this hole? Can I use a common vidia drill ? Thanks a lot 🎉
🔥 🔥🔥
Well hello there
seen you on Gold Shaw Farm's a lot.
Morgan help him with a song something like "My buddy Morgan" he lives just down the road. He`s a wizard with the ducks, He just hates hound hunting fucks, And we make the world a beeeeetter place.
@@aidanf1654 🤣
Hi Morgan.
You seem like such a good hearted person, God Bless
Those wedges were a lot smaller than I thought they would be. That was very educational.
These are 1/2" wedges, this material splits pretty easily so the smaller wedges work well. I will be getting bigger wedges for bigger blocks eventually.
That was a very distinct change in tone, once it was about to split. Quite interesting! Love seeing this kind of work. Greeting from Germany and good luck with your new channel!
Danke schön!
Ihr Leute aus Deutschland nervt echt, überall liest man von euch
@@pat_muellerOooohhh😢
When I took a rock and wood sculpting art course when I went to Castleton College they actively taught the double-tapping as a good practice for helping line up the chisels and increasing the bite of them. That said, that was down in West Rutland where it's mostly Marble - they had some Granite cuts around, but they didn't let students work them for that course specifically because of how bad the silica dust can get.
Great Video! Thanks for the demonstration. My grandfather was a stone mason from Germany. In the 30's he worked on the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale. I have a 20" round stone that is full of red garnet. I was thinking of using a diamond saw to cut around the circumference to try to split it. I'm thinking now to get a set of feathers and wedges and trying that instead.
Morgan sent me but this an amazing video its indepth
Great to see these artisan techniques in action. I saw a 6th cent. BC marble quarry on Naxos years ago with marks in the stone just like the ones left by your feathers and wedges. Now I know how they did it!
In Machu Picchu the same marks left by chisels. The Inca had bronze chisels too.
They way Alfred is so matter of fact and understated and the way Morgan blabs on and on! You guys must be hysterical working together! Loving the video!
When that stone split, I let out a "wow!"
Cool to see the subtle techniques you use, such as placing a small stone to act as a fulcrum when prying the two halves apart to retrieve your feathers and wedges.
Hello, came over from Gold Shaw Farm live video. Pretty cool stuff.
i wish i could have seen these vids a year ago - together with a contractor buddy of mine with an excavator we installed 100 linear feet of salvaged granite curbstone in my front landscape, and some of this stone dressing action would have been great to know.
watching this vid was not only educational, but also sooo meditative.
the sounds were so soothing and relaxing and I think it really must be such a satisfaction, when you start to hear those subtle cracks before finally the split opens up.
and it is just so amazing to see, what one guy with a drill and a hammer can do - without any heavy machinery, destroying all the area around.
Really looking forward to many more videos from you 😊
welcome to the goldshaw fam alfred!
Hello Alfred ; you actually got time for yourself , this is great I’m gonna really enjoy watching your videos Morgan send us all over thank you ♥️👍
You can really tell that Alfred got more comfortable with the camera around the 3 minute mark, which was cool to see. By the end he was a natural! I gasped when the stone split. It was super interesting to learn how to hear when that was going to happen, but I was expecting the split to be less dramatic than that. It was so cool!
Leave the sounds of steel and stone ringing as much as you can! It's a lovely sound, especially when it rings in a rhythm. :)
That was awesome thanks for showing. Your buddy Morgan sent us.
This is just so cool. You're a good teacher Alfred. I learned a lot by watching this video. Looking forward to more!
Alfred, thanks for the intro and the explanation. You made "magic" seem so understandable and easy! Thanks for the video.
The double tapping provides a perfect rhythm with the music you chose.
Listening to you strike the fetters and wedges was so soothing and I could actually hear the changes in the sounds as the stone got closer to breaking the final sound was magical.
I have always loved the end products of stone work, but I have never seen and heard it done before. To be honest I thought it took tremendous brute strength and ugly sounds. But seeing you work, I see nothing but artistry and music. There seems to be almost the need to feel a oneness with the stone. It was very inspiring.
I wish that I was young and healthy, I would love to cut the stones for my own raised garden beds myself.
I do some wood carvings and turning and it requires the same meditative approach. Sometimes as I am working, it feels like my hands are smarter than my head. As if my hands became one with the wood and knew how to bring the final desired shape out of the wood without forcing the wood. I know that that sounds crazy, but it’s just what I experience when I am working. When I look at the final product I feel such awe, because I know that I have just created something far beyond my own skills. I feel a relationship with the finished product that is worth more than any amount of money and so am I never willing to sell my work. It would be like selling my children.
Thank you so much. This video was both very enlightening and very very satisfying.
May God always bless the work of your hands Alfred.
Watched this a month ago. I didn’t know it’s YOU Alfred!
Incredible. Such minimal effort, such accuracy, such a beautiful split. Very nice. Very informative! Thank you sir, a genius in blue jeans indeed!
Morgan sent me. Nice video
That was so interesting. Hello from Essex VT. Now, back to the Gold Shaw chat...
Hi! Gold Shaw sent me! ❤️
Every effort supporting the next. So satisfying. Very cool. Thanks for showing us your process!
Last step had mesmerising melody, truly a wizard with machines calling it about to go before it's visible!
Morgan sent me. Glad to see how many subscribers you have!
Who's coming from the Livestream 👇
Alfred, Very cool video. I like the way you teach the process and describe the steps. Thank you for sharing your craft with the world. Well done!
Love it Alfred! Keep it up, can’t wait to see you build the Vermont hobbit hideaway….. I have always wondered how they built castles and those stone walls!! I mean pretty much anything stone
Hello Alfred. Hope all goes great for you in your new Stone business.
Thanks for taking me/us through a beautiful demonstration
Thank you for sharing that Alfred. I've seen this sort of thing before, but it was great to get a "start to finish" demonstration.
My impression is that part of the hammer drills advantage is it’s rotation which helps clear the face of the hole of cuttings, leading to a cleaner strike. By hand, your chisel is often striking cuttings within the hole. In my business we typically use water or mud (a slurry really) to clean cuttings from the hole and cool the bit.
I'm pretty sure you're correct, after rotating the bit it would take a couple strikes to get through the resulting dust before I was hitting stone again. I need to get compressed air up there for a variety of reasons, but in this case it would have been helpful to clear the hole. I assume you drill wells of some type?
Hi Alfred....good job!
This is an excellent channel. Looking forward to more.
Good luck Alfred with your new quarry. I look forward to watching you do your thing! This may sound weird but I do stained glass and your splitting the granite seemed as satisfying as scoring and breaking a piece of glass. When it goes just right there is relief and gets the creative juices flowing. Is that sort of how you feel in your work?
That was a great comparison. I also enjoyed hearing the sound change just before the split. 😃
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing your art with us! Looking forward to more!
Morgan says hi.
Fascinating Alford ! Very artistic. Never knew what and how a piece of granite turned into a beautiful piece of work and what all would be involved in starting it.
Just came over from gold shaw farm. This is so interesting. That was so cool listening and watching you crack apart that huge rock. The littlest things in life could be so peaceful to watch and hear. It's pretty neat for me to listen to it because I'm supposed to wear hearing aids , and I don't lol but when I'm watching this I wear my earbuds and I can hear the rock and everything crack and it's so cool to hear those sounds . The littlest things in life huh lol Thank you for sharing your video, I'm looking forward to watching more.🤗
I'm sure with your engineering and masonry skills it will be a success.
That was incredible to watch you're very wise man with a lot of knowledge I enjoy your videos
That was delightful to watch! The crunchy sound the stone made just before falling open was awesome. I was worried the side closest to you was going to fall onto your feet, so I was surprised to see how little any of it moved. Is there a way to predict how pieces will settle once they come free? I could listen to all these sounds for a long time. Very cool to hear how they change.
You get a sense of what they will do once they split. You can also generally hear the stone get ready to go, when it starts sounding hollow it's time to inventory your fingers and toes, then make sure that they are in a safe place
My Buddy Alfred! Loving the channel man!
Hi Alfred, yet another person who was sent by Morgan
it was so obvious when it sounded hollow just befor the split- that was really interesting!
That was fascinating. Thanks for showing us how splitting by hand is done. Amazing one man can do that to such a large piece of stone.
Setting your videos to music definitely enhances viewing enjoyment. Love the country and western music genre.
Fellow Vermonter here...was intrigued by your occaisional appearances on Morgan's channel. Glad to see you with your own. Wicked pissah, Alfred! :D
Heya Alfred! Thanks for the video and also from all of us in the gold Shaw farm youtube family we wish you they best of luck on all your future endeavors and also those bucket list things you wanna get too!
Love the sound of the rock breaking, you're right, there is a change of tune when you strike as things progress!
Came from gold shaw, super excited to see you get more confident on camera!
My dad needed to fragment a huge flat bolder so he could move it to make way for a new garden. He had watched his father split a large stone with a half stick of dynamite. They used a chisel to bore a hole and packed the dynamite with clay. My grandfather lit the fuse and casually stepped back a few steps while my grandmother freaked out. They barely heard the thud and the stone split nicely. So my father resolved to do the same to split his boulder. After we finished boring the hole with a chisel, my dad was unable to procure any dynamite. Times change. I still have the boulder with the bore hole and I'm going to keep it. All this came to mind while I watched you split that stone. I wondered if you ever work with low explosives in your stone work?
I love work. I can sit and watch it for hours.
Wow that was Very Cool 😎 ALFRED 👍👍
Alfred! I'm only 8 minutes in and I'm fascinated. Glad you cared to share your knowledge; thank you!
I cannot tell you how much I appreciated your video today. I live a bit west of Vermont (Nebraska), but north of us is a stone called Sioux Quartzite, or the old name is jasper. It's a beautiful red color with flecks of red in it, a beautiful stone, and like the granite you're working with, a granular igneous stone. In the older parts of Midwestern towns you would often come across a house using stone blocks just slightly thicker than bricks and otherwise similar dimensions to construct the house, or the garden wall, or the curb, etc, and I always wondered how the blocks were constructed, since they didn't have a sawn surface, but had a more natural face. I'm pretty confident that those stones, from the 1890's-1930's, were probably created using a similar technique to the one you demonstrated today. Thank you for answering a 50ish year old curious question. :)
I know nothing about stone masonery....but this was amazing...love seeing you at Gold Shaw Farm too.
Hi. What a fantastic adventure is ahead of you. Glad to be aboard. Found you from Goldshaw.
Glad you are protecting your eyes and ears as much as possible.❤ Beautiful work, Alfred.
Wow, You could hear when it was going to split. Amazing.
Wow. Amazing how it split.
Could you retrieve the feathers and wedges with a super strong magnet (like those used for magnet fishing)?
This looks so cool!
That was the most gratifying 20 minutes of my entire day.
P.S...: SELVEDGE DENIM GANG!!
Soso Brothers Custom Denim! 25 oz Taishoku
@@vermontheritagegranitecomp2062 I’ve never owned a pair of Sosos… yet.
Excellent video and explanation, please create a video demonstrating how to cut the round stone for use in a millstone.
That’s amazing never realized that that’s the way to get it done. And not a lot of efforts
Morgan sent me, I knew nothing about stone -- but you got me believing that I can split any stone -- going to cut the property line stone!!!
I only knew about breaking stone underground in the mines of the Porcupine Mining Camp (Ontario Canada) using all sizes and types of hydraulic rock breakers...stone masonery is something that that I was always interested me.
Ive seen feathering from other youtube videos and still amazed that a few drill holes and a feather can split large boulders
cathartic. I want to see you more confident! You know what you're doing. WOOT!
I was a mason tender for a quarry out of New Hampshire we did a lot of walls with sedimentary sandstone
Excellent video bro and the music was off the hook.
Wow I found a old tin with 7 wedges like those. I really thought they were old ship/ home building nails. Seen such used as nails.. Being by a river that use to have ships. But there also was logging and quarries.
glad you are wearing glasses…safety first! good video!
I would recommend more light music while you're talking to cover the dead spots while you think, I think that would help your videos greatly!
Hi Alfred. Just subscribed.
Toby made me do it
Lol
Wow i actually rewound to watch that split again so good 😊
Ur amazing
I'm always afraid to hit my hand when I use a hammer. Thanks for the double tap trick. I'll try it! :)
Wow your skills are amazing 😄 you’ve def got a skill most people do not and alot of those skills as we know are being lost. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, now go far and dream big and I cannot wait to watch this quarry unfold😍
love the background music!
Very nice splitting, so clean
I find that a magnetic retrieval tool that fits in whatever hole size you are using is good to have on hand when doing this. If a feather or wedge drops in a hole it makes it really easy to get it back out. It would have been handy to get all the pieces out of the crack at the end.
That's a good idea, I reach for my multi tool pretty often, but that's only helpful if it's not too late
Very nicely done video. We are looking forward to many more. That was very informative and so interesting. We are located in the flint hills of Kansas. We have so many beautiful rocks here too. Thank You! We are subscribers now.
Sounds are an important part of choosing safe pieces of stone.
Thank you for sharing you knowledge and skill
This is very interesting and informative.
That is really cool to watch!
Leather gloves my buddy Alfred.😊
This is one of my favourite videos on granite splitting.
Music , footage, the way you speak , everything is very educative and inspiring .
Congratulations!
.. I'm gonna buy a set of 1/2 " feathers and wedges to start cutting granite at my homestead up here in the Serra da Mantiqueira, Brazil's southeast . Just two questions :
How long does it take to drill each of this hole?
Can I use a common vidia drill ?
Thanks a lot 🎉
Well done!!!! Toby dog says hi 🙃
That was awesome to see!
Very satisfying to see the split, not sure why.
Beautiful!
So interesting Alfred!
Nice and Interesting
Eyes, ears, lungs, Alfred. Protect yourself and your future health.