Friday, August 18, 2006

Solid as a rock

This pile of stuff may not look like it, but it could have been designated to be your countertop at one time. The waste material from mining and shaping granite is sold for $270 for a 10 ton load like this one I had delivered at Wimberley earlier today. See that pink flag on the stake in the background? It marks the center of the 5,000 gallon fiberglass rainwater storage tank which will sit there in a few weeks. It will serve as the sole water source for the weekend cottage to be built soon.

Don't see a connection yet? Turns out that crushed granite is the preferred material to support, yep, fiberglass tanks. This one will weigh around 40,000 pounds when full of water, so it seems weird at first to trust all that weight to a pile of countertop wanna be. But, what it really does is just transfer the weight, more evenly than most materials would, to the bedrock below.

Now all I have to do is scrap off all the organic material in a 14' diameter around that stake, move the granite over there, then spread it until it is perfectly level. Volunteers?