How do I turn small granite boulders into usable home construction material.

[unclehooter]

I have over 100 granite boulders approximately 1' to 3' diameter. I would like to know if it is possible on a limited budget to turn them into shaped veneer for a fireplace, shape corner stones, and potentiall slice them in either rough or fine surface finishes for use on the interior floors/countertops. Do local stone suppliers offer cutting services?

[Mark D.]

You can cut chisel them, but you would need a saw with a 30" diameter to slice a 12" thick piece in a single pass.  If you had them all in slices and you wanted to surface polish them that would require more high end equipment if you wanted them to be high gloss with a single plane finish.

Mark

[unclehooter]

Thanks Mark. The principle reason would be for the rough stone veneer on the side of the house. I would like to have the veneer finish on my chimney, pillars and three walls of an extension on my house, so we are talking a lot of granite. Can I get this with just a cut chisel or would it be best accomplished with a combination of drill, saw and/or chisel. The material costs are in the 10s of thousands for similar natural veneer. My thoughts are that I don't mind doing the work and it uses resources I already have at home so there would be a cool factor in knowing this. I could resell the equipment when I am done to recover some of the costs.

It looks like the investment would be about $3k to $5k. What would you recommend as a list of tools for accomplishing this? Thanks in advance for your help.

[Mark D.]

Guesstimate of bridge saw that holds a 30" blade - $100K or more.
You might find one used on Ebay for half that, but I doubt it.

Now that we have that out of the way, you could make cuts into each stone with a Skilsaw to give you a start on your crack that is roughly an inch or so deep. then get a chisel and a hammer and split them down. You can "erase" the chisel marks by using a wire wheel brush on the grinder. You may have to rough sand the sawcut marks out of the stone.

If you try and cut all the way around the stone you will be hard put to match up the cuts, so I don't like that idea...

I know there are splitters available, but I have no idea if they work for this or how they would do...maybe someone else can help with this question?

Mark