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Thursday, January 4th, 2007 04:31 pm
Tomorrow I get to drive up to Bellingham to pick up 450 pounds of extremely flat granite.
Friday, January 5th, 2007 12:54 am (UTC)
I find their claims for granite interesting - I haven't met a non-magnetic granite yet, and it's only some bits of granite that are harder than steel - the micas can be very soft, if it's micaceous at all. They also stain like a bastard, and the soft minerals erode out, creating a pitted surface. Of course, from the photo, what they are selling doesn't look like any granite I've ever seen - if it's just a block of shaped rock, it looks more like a slightly porphyritic andesitoid hypabyssal intrusive, and if it's a reconstituted/cemented block, then it's probably not granite at all.

At my old work, we used to mount our spectrometers on finely machined, accurately levelled granodiorite slabs. We stopped bothering some years ago, as it's not really worth the bother of shifting all the granite. When SHRIMP one gets decommissioned, the granodiorite will probably be given out to the original design team for mementos, garden rocks, or in some cases, headstones.
Saturday, January 13th, 2007 05:58 pm (UTC)
Rock on!