Carbide Chisels

Last week we told the story of how the team in Colorado (as a gift to the monastery) molded and cast copies of the carbide chisels now in use in sculpting Iraivan Temple. It is important that we show these chisels, partly because they are the brilliant invention of our own team in Bengaluru and partly because otherwise visitors in the future will be unaware of the change from mild steel to carbide-tipped tools.

Yesterday the monks installed them at the Temple Builders' Pavilion, on the stone you see here with two siplis seated. The slide show reveals details.

The silpi on the left is making a rough cut to size the stone, and on the right the silpi is smoothing with special \"sandpaper chisels.\" Their tools are shown between them.

The original (real) chisel is below and the four above are bronze replicas.

We placed one near the hammer.

And the other, next to the old-style mild steel chisels that were replaced and are no longer used.

Here they are again in context. We take a moment to congratulate Jiva, Senthiladiban and Thuraisingam in India for this invention, superior in every way to the chisels used for 8,000 years!

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