Anza Borrego #4 Pearlstone

7/26/22

 It's half past eight Tuesday night. I didn't put up a post Monday because I hadn't started a new stone. Last week I did a half assed job of cleaning the garage, then I trimmed the Chinese elm, and the Umbrella plant out front, and just cleaned up some small stuff around the house, and grounds.  Saturday the bike gang got together to check a possible new cruise. It wasn't so great. We ended up doing twenty miles of housing tracts and surface streets in the coastal flats just inland from Huntington. We did some riding on the Santa Ana River trail, and some through Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, but altogether too much on surface streets and sidewalks. I was up for a slow, easy park cruise, but not much more. The years are catching up to me, and the all day ride kicked my ass. I was flopped on the couch all day Sunday, too.

 

Wed. 7/27

I didn't plan on starting the new stone, Tuesday. It just sort of happened. We had a cool, cloudy morning, a welcome break at this time of year. I was sitting in the gazebo, enjoying a stale coffee, and a w&b with Buddy the Cat, and the Most Mysterious Skinamalink. The wheels started turning in my head. I crossed the yard, and started checking out the pearl stone. 

*wait*

 The pearl stone? I'm not kiddin' that name just jumped straight from my sub conscious to the keyboard. So, The Pearl Stone, it is. Anyway, as you can see in the first picture, there's a streak of tan color running up and down the left side of the rock. I was thinking about sawing the base along that brown streak, and using the flat face that the stone sits on   for the front end of the figure. But then I re-considered. The stone is much more square than it looks. It's roughly 11" x 13", either way. I decided to just use the flat cut that was already there for the base.

But once I got the stone up on the table I saw the crack. It ran the full circumference of the stone, right above the brown streak. So I had to go back to the original plan, and make a base cut. I don't like this part. 

There are several ways of setting up a stone to make the base cut. Sometimes I've set up a jig to hold the stone, 'just-so'. Other times I've strapped the rock down to the table. This time, I took a chance on doing it freehand. I got the stone wedged up level on the board, and scribed a base line all around the circumference of the stone. (tricky) Sometimes you have to do sections. But the gods were with me on this one, and all the sections lined up, and connected like magic. Then I traced over the line with a hacksaw blade, then rolled the cut around the corners, going a little deeper with each pass. Then the bow saw. Round and round, until later on in the afternoon the cut went all the way through, and exactly twenty pounds of rock fell away.

 

 It took a few runs on the sanding board to finish the job. This part of the project usually takes two, or three days. I knocked it out in one. Groovy.

 

 

I'll be doing something different on this project. I know exactly what the finished piece is going to look like. I will have a really for real plan for this one, with measurements, and everything. This is a rough draft. There's a bunch of changes to make, and stuff I have to mess with yet. Stay tuned.