Tools and Machinery of the Granite Industry, Part III

In the early days of stone lettering, a stonecutter simply cut freehand using a cutter's hand hammer and lettering chisels of various widths, following a mental image of the lettering content, style and layout. Early gravestones include examples where the stonecutter did not plan ahead and ran out of space, having then to use an abbreviation or reduced-size letters. More careful workers might trace a design on the stone before cutting, perhaps using a straight edge and lettering block. It soon became clear that much better results were achieved when a draftsman created a full-sized detail drawing of the lettering. Usually, this drawing was shown to the customer who signed it, verifying that he was satisfied and that there were no misspellings or other mistakes. The stone letterer usually owned several dozen ½-inch lettering chisels since there were always some being sharpened. Also, he had perhaps a dozen 1/8-inch to 3/8-inch chisels to cut inside the letters (for example A, B, P, R) and narrow places on the outside. For raised letters, he would have a dozen or so 5/8-inch points to work down the background. For the background, some raised letter carvers preferred using a sequence of roughers: a ½-inch four-point chisel, a 1-inch double-row toothed chisel, a 1-inch single-row toothed chisel, a 1-inch double row plain chisel, a 1-inch single row plain chisel, and a small bush chisel, of which they would own several of each. Initially these would have been hand tools, but later these would all have been adapted as bits for the pneumatic hammer (Figure 46).

Sandblasting was used as early as 1875 by Sheldon and Slason of West Rutland, Vermont, to cut letters on Civil War gravestones. Chilled iron shields or stencils were used to cut both sunk and raised lettering. Sandblasting was introduced to the granite industry in a major way around 1915 and revolutionized letter cutting and shape carving. Stones to be lettered were put on sandblast skids and wheeled into a stencil cutting room on a hydraulic lift truck. The typical steps in sandblast carving are: creation of the design; drafting of a full-size detail drawing; cementing a rubber stencil onto the stone (rubber mallets and rollers were used to insure that the stencil adhered uniformly to the stone); transferring the design from the detail drawing to the stencil; cutting the stencil with a stencil cutting knife; and sandblasting (blowing) with silicon carbide. Some stencil cutters did both stencil cutting and sandblasting. In 1925, lettering systems were introduced that provided templates for letters of different sizes and fonts (Figure 47). Stencil-cutting machines that could cut letters of different sizes and fonts were introduced in 1968. Sandblast letters do not have as sharp and well-defined edges as hand-cut letters and the bottoms are a more rounded U-shape. Although the sandblast edges can be sharpened with a small hand-held grinding wheel, the practiced eye can still distinguish the two.