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    Stone usually means marble or granite, but it can include many differnet slab-style stones like onyx and slate, as well as semi-precious and precious stone, imitation stone, stone veneer, and composite stone.
  When we work with stone, we often contract out the standard stone work to large stone suppliers, then bring the stone blanks into our shop to refine both the finish and precision. This is important when we're incorporating stone into a piece with other non-forgiving materials like glass or metal because the interface between these different materials must be very accurately machined, and bushed with flexible busings (like felt, rubber, or plastic) to allow for mutual expansion and contraction without the finished piece rattling or breaking sometime in the future. The engineering of a piece that incorporates these different types of materials has to be addressed very carefully.

Below are some images of stone work that we've built.
   This piece is a good example of precision work involving stone, glass, and metal. The glass box is mortised into a groove in the 5" thick piece of black slate head-piece, which is held up by a bronze rod drilled through the stone with a bushed bolt capping them together. The bronze hinges are drilled through the glass door which swings clear of the unit yet close with a soft impact.
   This is a static piece without moving parts, but shows the precision alliance between red marble, black slate, and glass. The two stones glue well together with one type of adhesive, the glass to the red marble with another type of adhesive, and the face piece of glass to the side piece of glass with yet another adhesive. All these interfaces must be strong adhesive but flexible enough to allow differences in behavior of the materials.