Drilling Marble

The sink top that this little yellow chrysanthemum is sitting on waited a long time for its second life....  it feels so smooth and the veining so beautiful... we were determined to figure out how we would make it work...


..click pictures  to ENLARGE...

The most frustrating thing about it all was that everyone we asked didn't know anything about drilling marble and couldn't help us at all.. .. it is a shame that the knowledge of the past is disappearing .. we checked in books and online and decided we might as well try it ourselves and give it a shot since we had the old marble top anyway and if we could get it to work for us it was worth a try...

Our biggest fear was that it would crack... but now after finding how easy it was to drill  we would not be nervous again.. as long as not much pressure is applied and we just go slowly and let the drill do the work.. We used a hole cutter for ceramic with diamond grit on the end... these pictures start when we were beginning to drill the third hole... the drill bit has to be constantly cooled  so my job was directing the flow of the water, just a trickle, the easiest part... although the drilling  was not difficult at all,  just needed a slow gentle hand..

... the marble was heavy and so thick...  1 1/2" (you can see the marble plugs we cut out sitting on top of the sink in a couple of the pictures) ...that the drill would not go all the way through... we turned it sideways, shone a light through the cut side and the spot showed through its translucency.. we traced the circle, flipped the slab, laid it down and began drilling from the back... we did this for each hole... the last one popped out... the white slurry that was created by the drilling was very dense and fine and felt so smooth on the fingertips.  makes me wonder what it could be used for.. I'm sure someone has already thought of something to make from it...

 ...we also had to drill 4 small holes on the back to hold the clamp attachments to secure the undermount porcelain sink in place...  I never got pictures of that...  they were held in place with a heavy-duty epoxy, which we had to try a couple kinds to get one that worked... no one knew what to recommend for that either..  but we know now...
 

  

For quite a while, we had saved some old hardwood staircase spindles in the garage for a reason, we knew not what.. til now... and decided they could possibly work for the front leg supports for the sink... but they were too short, since we wanted the marble top to be about 36" high... we took a couple more spindles and cut them at spots where the turnings were appropriate... John drilled into each end and glued and fitted them together with dowels...... 2 legs just the right length...  and kind of special too, I think...  as we looked carefully at each of the spindles, there were subtle nuances observable so it is a fact that each one of them had been hand-turned in their beginning.

... we used some true 1" thick, 100 year old, salvaged, maple, nice and dry, stair-tread for the apron..  because we had it and it was good stuff...   intricate patterns can be cut from it and it is still strong...   John used a drill and a jigsaw to create the pattern in the wood ... then attached the legs and put in corner braces just behind them...

                                                                                                      ...at the studio...

here it is attached to the wall, where he had previously put a 2" x 6"  at the given height...  and began putting all the pieces together...


... little chrome circles were attached over the old square holes on either side ...
.... at a monument shop in nearby Sussex we were able to find a small leftover piece of limestone (since they didn't have any marble) from when they used to make kitchen counter tops, that seemed to be complimentary to our old marble, to use as a back-splash.. not exactly the same but that's ok... the whole assemblage is made of parts from hither and yon anyway and that's fine with us.. We like living a Bohemian Life...




Moral of story..........  Drilling marble is not as hard as Marble......

or......  If you decide you want to do something... just keep on doing it till you're done.