Featured Check out my personal headstone!

In the vein of planning ahead and reutilizing things, I decided to use my machinist's pink granite surface plate as my own headstone. This brainstorm hit me as we were preparing to mount it on the three "airy points" as required to keep the tool as flat as possible. I don't know whether my idea is original or not, but I think this 600 lb., 24" x 36" chunk would work fine in most any stone farm except those requiring small, flat stones.

 

Hi Spring,
I think it is a great idea. When they were going to raze my grandparents house. I decided to take the back door marble stoop. It was 2ft by 3ft. After digging it up I found that it was an old tombstone! It seems like a hundred years ago there was a family plot that was covered over by my great uncles house and one tombstone was reused as a back door stoop. I had an iron frame made for it to use as a coffee table. My ex wife hated it so much I was forced to give it away.
greg

 

excellent idea......can't wait to see what you engrave on it !!

 

I'm disappointed. I felt sure that Spring's plan was to be shot from a cannon.

 

u sure that's not....shot by...a cannon !

 

Nope - A most unique way to scatter the ashes.

 

so's my way......just not ashes !!!

 

Parting is such sweet marrow.

 

A Sharpie inscription is just not going to last Spring...

 

Will you carve it or blast it Spring ?

 

Yeah, I kinda took that for granite.

 

whatever the monument shop is used to doing-I haven't done any stone carving.

 

OH!!!!
And I left that alone!!!

 

And you'll be more under the pink than in it.

 

Probably blasting with a rubber stencil.

 

The dremel wouldn't cut it for this job.... Maybe they could put a random pattern on it with canister shot?

 

'Write' your name and inscription in found parts.

 

Do they still allow upright stones? We closed the headstone business back in the 70s when many cemeteries started requiring flat bronze markers...........

 

That's a fine piece of stone.

 

I read an ad by Starrett, a fine old instrument-maker preferred by many machinists, regarding surface plates. They say a high quartz content is important to the life expectancy of a granite surface plate. High quartz content preserves the flatness, otherwise sliding steel instruments on it day after day will wear it so it either has to be discarded or re-ground and re-certified, not inexpensive processes. Mine is, like almost everything I have, "previously owned" and I have yet to put the precision height gauge on it to check the flatness. I think unless it has been abused for years, it'll be good enough for my purposes; my work doesn't have to pass any government inspectors.