Friday, January 7, 2011

Handy New Knock Off


Tomas Lipps, director of the Stone Foundation and organizer of this year's Symposium in Ventura California, (and the man responsible for putting together nine other international stone symposiums since 2000, held in various stone-related places throughout North America and also in Spain) holds up a hammer he has just had fabricated by Trow and Holden. It is modeled after the Mallorcan hammer we were introduced to when the symposium workshop students were taught a very different method of shaping stone and walling back in 2007 in Deia Spain. The hammer is a hefty seven pounds in weight with an 18 inch handle and a rounded indentation in the head so that it has an edge on all four striking planes. It seems to do a good job of knocking off edges and making nice faces in the sandstone we have been working with this week. Lluc Mir who is here from Spain teaching one of the Ventura workshops likes this 'knock off' of the type of hammer he is used to working with, but suggests the handle could be even longer.