Drilling into Granite

As our CyberCadets know, the Iraivan Temple Builders' Memorial is proceeding this summer. Above is the latest work, three pieces that arrived from Loveland, Colorado. In the captions we tell the happenings of the last few days.

It started with the arrival of the crates.

The next three bronzes were carefully offloaded near the final site.

This one contains Selvanathan Sthapati

The big one weighs 1100 pounds and is a replica of the TARA pillars as seen in the first photo.

Then three days later we are ready to prepare the big stone for installation. You can see the template here which shows the craftsman where to drill the holes.

This is the local company that did the work.

Brennan spent three hours at the task, and Thamby Kumaran helped Sadasivanathaswami guide the morning along.

Brannen is making two circles for the bronzes to stand on.

This is his primary tool.

He calls this a waffle head.

Basically it is exactly the same technology used by the silpis, except Brannen\

s is power driven and the silpis use hand chisels.'

We were impressed to see the old and the new coming together.

So impressed we kept taking photos of this thing!

After making the flat circles, Brannen drilled seven holes four inches deep into the hard stone.

Stainless steel bolts will fit into the holes and be anchored by a special concrete.

Brannen protects the stone by wrapping his t-shirt around his boots.

It\

s hard work, quite physical'

He also uses a diamond cutter

Dust, dust and more dust

this is a small jackhammer chipping away the elevated areas.

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