I talked about how many rocks we were uncovering during excavation of our basement.  In the last few days we’ve watched them tackle the really big ones, that the excavator can’t budge.

Now that rock was a monster.  When we dug back, it not only exposed 10 feet of depth, but there were two very large rocks right next to it. The excavator grappled with that rock for a good 45 minutes but could not budget it.

If you look closely, you can see the excavator treads being lifted off the ground by the force of pulling on the rock.  Plan B was to have the stone guys come in an split the rock.

You can see there just how large the rock is.  They started by drilling a series of holes with a jack hammer along a line.  Then they inserted steel wedges and hammered them all in.  This caused the rock to crack along the line and then the excavator could pull the cracked piece off.

That particular rock had to be broken into 7 pieces, almost all of which were too heavy themselves to be loaded onto a truck by the excavator.  In the end, they had to drop a roll-off and the excavator had to push the pieces on.

The grain of the rock is just spectacular.

These are going to make some great pieces somewhere, perhaps for a fireplace mantle.