Hand Stone Carving

Carving By Hand

There are different styles of carving letters, all memorials are carved with the old age tradition by hand.

Hand carved letters cave in to a v shape, the depth of the letters depends of the size of the letter. I would set the inscription out free hand on the memorial, any style can be carved. Then letters are carved using different sized tungsten chisels and lettering hammer. On some stone, such as granite, a softer tungsten tip chisel is used. After the letter has been carved there are different ways of filling the letter. The letter can be hand painted with different paints. Also an old age method of filling letters is filling them with lead. The letters are drilled using very fine drill bits, and the holes are drilled into the letters to different angels to stop the lead from falling from the carved letter. The lead is cut using tin snips to the shape of the letter, the lead is beaten in using a leading hammer, and then the letter is gauged out to form the shape of letter. Then the next process is to hand sand back, using abrasive sand paper, to form a flush lead letter, which will stand the test of time for many years.
Another style of letter is raised lead lettering, which is used on harder stone such granite; this is a letter which is an old tradition, only because the invention of tungsten tip chisels has enabled hard carving in granite memorial. Raised letters are set out on the memorial freehand, the small holes are drilled in different angles. The lead is beaten to the face of the memorial, then carved with cold steel chisels and small steel headed hammers of different sizes to achieve the required font. Then the flat face of the lead letter is either painted using paint or gilded using 23 ½ K gold.

Lead Lettering

Gilding of Lettering

The letter is hand painted with a gold adhesive, which is then left to settle then gold is either laid on with loose gold leaf with a hand made goat hair brush or in raised leading gilding applied with transfer golf leaf.

Stone carving is an ancient activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work.

Work carried out by paleolithic societies to create flint tools is more often referred to as knapping. Stone carving that is done to produce lettering is more often referred to as lettering.

Stone carving differs from stone quarrying in that it is the act of shaping or incising the stone, whereas quarrying is the activity of acquiring useful stone, usually in blocks, from geological sources.

The term stone carving is of particular significance to sculptors being a reference to a particular way of producing sculpture, as opposed to modelling in clay or casting. The term also refers to the activity of masons in dressing stone blocks for use in architecture, building or civil engineering. It is also a phrase used by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to describe the activity involved in making some types of petroglyphs.

info by wikipedia