Slicing Up the Zebra Stone and Printstone Rough

Muddy Sunday – Slicing the Zebra Stone and Printstone

Just over a year ago we were asked by a client if we could work some Zebra Stone for her and create some pendants which we did, and ever since we have been looking for some Zebra Stone of our own to work with.

Not so long ago we ordered some Zebra Stone and Printstone rough from Australia and it’s been sat out in the workshop for a couple of weeks since it arrived. Well on Saturday we decided it was time to slice it up into slabs.

Pictures of the chunks of Zebra Stone and Printstone Rough

If you have ever read my previous post about Zebra Stone of 7th May 2012 you will know that I was wary of getting water, cutting oil or anything else near this stone so I got out my mitre saw and set it up.

After about two hours I had managed to almost cut one slice, this batch of Zebra Stone (as was the Printstone) was much harder than the first lot we worked with, as you can imagine I was pretty worn out after I got the first slice cut, and so was the saw blade, the teeth were all worn away, so obviously this method of cutting wasn’t going to be an option.

This was painful, dry cutting the rough!

The only other option we had to hand was our 8” diamond saw, but that uses “metprep” cutting oil, and as I said previously I was wary of letting anything like this near the stone in case of contamination. So, after some mulling things over we decided to empty out the sump and give it a thorough clean, then we reassembled the saw a refilled the sump with clean water only.

The reasoning behind this is that the Zebra Stone and Printstone would have been subjected to the elements before they were mined so clean water shouldn’t do any harm!

Little did I realise that I was about to embark on the mother of all mud baths! The biggest problem I was having was actually seeing what I was doing, because the dirty water was flying up and coating my safety glasses, so I had to keep stopping and dunking them in a bucket of water to clean them.

This was a mud bath – cutting the Printstone and Zebra Stone on the diamond saw.

Every time a new slab came off the saw Shalini was standing there waiting to go and clean it up, it almost reminded me of the nurse waiting to go and clean up the baby after it had just been delivered.

Well after almost 3 hours of cutting we ended up with a combined total of 28 zebra Stone and Printstone slabs of varying sizes and thicknesses.

So, was it all worth it – you bet!

What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon!