Stonesmithing with Trow & Holden Tools

The first time I touched a Trow & Holden tool was in 2008 when I attended a dry stone workshop in Washington.  Randy was there showcasing their tools.  Our group was building a dry stone bridge and he showed me how to use a Mason's Chipper to dress the face of the Wisconsin limestone pieces.  I was just a few years into the dry stone world at that time and had little knowledge of the tools.  So, when he showed me what a carbide-tipped chisel could do my eyes were suddenly opened to what was possible in this trade.  Up until this point I understood the craft only in my head from reading books and had very little hands-on experience other than building walkways and patios.

Now, 9 years later, I own about half of their masonry tools.  I've "dressed" beautiful arrises on Wisconsin limestone; roughed out huge blocks of Western Colorado sandstone; shaped Southwestern Colorado quartzitic sandstone for curved walls; and currently we're detailing hundreds of planks of Chinese basalt so that our walls "sing to the eye".

While we generally use their tools in the way and for the purpose for which they were designed, I've also innovated new purposes for them with great results.  For our two projects built in 2016 we split, shaped, tooled and finished approximately 75 tons of stone (sandstone and granite) from raw rock harvested directly from quarries. We used Shims and Wedges to make curved capstones.  We used the Quarry Buster to split 400-pound pieces into 200-pound cornerstones.  We used the Hand Set to shape out these pieces and and a Mason's Chipper to make crisp arrises.  To make the "pineapple" textures on our Moongate transition stone we used their Hand Point.  Lastly, we used the Bush Hammer to texture the stone faces on our end/corner pieces.

We work our tools very hard and push them to their max especially with the tons of basalt we are working with right now on our project in California.  So, I regularly send all of my tools back to Trow & Holden to get sharpened or repaired.  For me, there's absolutely nothing more satisfying than taking a piece of raw rock and turning it into a fine piece of stone that will last for eternity.  To do this, you must have the right tools and we trust Trow & Holden.

It's A Miracle: How The Kenco Multi-Lifter Changed Our Game

The only way to make a blog about a Kenco Mult-Lifter interesting is to be honest and a little, necessarily, self-effacing.

Last year, I landed the biggest project in my career thus far as a Stonesmith with a 7-figure budget.  Due to a lot of weird and surprising constraints I had to get super creative about my approach in order to build on the scale and in the timeline desired by the client while still adhering to the "dry stone" method that I specialize in for all my works.  But, this one had a new twist:  The client wanted a modern, minimalist, mountain theme, which would require large, square and rectangular shaped pieces.

With these parameters in mind, my stone importer (based in Seattle) and I came up with an approach that combined a "Lego-like" building method with the flexibility of a "modular" design.  The stone pieces ranged in weight from 200 to 2,000 pounds.  (Now, keep in mind that most of the stone I've used over the years can be moved with a dolly, two men and some rock bars.)  So, I ordered approximately 750,000 pounds of basalt and granite stone and had it shipped over from the quarries in Southern China.  Then, I never thought twice about it because I was also the Project Director and had a hundred other tasks to focus on right away.  In the back of mind I figured I'd just use skidsteer machines, 2x4 wood runners and pipe.  If you look at photos and videos of the project thus far and the size of the stone we are moving around this is really embarrassing considering that my wall planks alone average 810 pounds each.  But, I simply had no schema in my brain for anything like this.

By about the third day of installation I started panicking inside when I realized I'd not done my due diligence with planning and figuring how we were going to efficiently move hundreds of tons of stone around on a very, very tight schedule.  A couple of the guys started drilling 2 holes in each 6' long, 810 pound wall plank, inserted eye bolts and lifted them with straps.  It worked!  My first impression was that this would be the answer and I was happy.  Certainly, a lot faster than pushing these pieces around with rock bars.  Then, I did some calculations based on how many wall planks we were actually installing each day with this method and I panicked again.  

The owner of the landscape design company that was collaborating with me on this project suggested I look into buying a lifting device he found online and he showed me a photo of Kenco's Multi-lifter.  Once I looked at this I realized a miracle was about to happen.  I called Jessica at Kenco that same day and ordered 2 of them.   We were all honestly blown away by how these lifting devices worked and how much stone they could hold and lift.  We've been using them every day now for nearly 2-1/2 months.  We've attached them to excavators and sky tracks.  We've lifted pieces ranging from 200 to 1,400 pounds with both smooth and rough faces.  

Today, if I start thinking about what we would have done (or not done) had we not discovered Kenco's Multi-lifters I feel nauseous inside.  Along with some different compression driven vacuum lifters we purchased, Kenco's Multi-lifters are such a game-changer for us now that we already see new possibilities for future stone projects where we can scale up the weight, size and shape of the stone we use.