Blog Exploring Natural Stone Production with Brothers - Step 01: Block Selection!
01/23/2024
How much do you know about where the stones you know and love really come from? At Brothers in Granite we feel like their journey from the earth to your finished project is just as important as what happens to them after and deserves to be told. Join us and discover some of the most important steps in bringing these natural works of art to the market and our customers.
Our adventure starts at the quarry. These can sometimes be the sides of mountains while others are deep holes in the jungle where desirable rocks have been found and are extracted. Many of these quarries are located in inhospitable regions far from major cities or even roads and the very act of reaching some of these quarries is already a perilous trek across rivers and dirt paths - sometimes a helicopter is the only way!
After we’ve reached our destination the next step is selecting a block. These blocks are huge - several meters on each side and will eventually make up 12-55 individual slabs. The difficulty for our highly-trained block selection team is to look at the pattern on the exterior of the blocks and use their imaginations to picture what the slabs deep in the interior will look like. It’s truly an art and the consistent beauty of our slabs is a testament to their hard work and skill.
After we’ve made it to the quarry and selected our block it’s then made ready for shipment. The same roads and paths that brought us to the quarry have to transport the stones out and you can imagine the difficulties that entails! The next stop is Brother’s own slab-cutting factory where we use our multi-wire saws to transform the raw block into 2-or-3 centimeter slabs which then head to the next part of the process at our finishing factory.
Join us next time and we’ll explore that part of the process with you as well!
