Making a Stone Tub

I found a 25,000 pound boulder on my property and decided to make a rock tub with it. This project was very challenging. It took about 7 weeks of time over the course of 6 months of starting this document. I documented the whole process and I hope you enjoy it. When I found this rock and got it out of the ground and once the idea came across for a rock tub, I just could not get it out of my head. I knew it would be a very challenging project but I was kind of more inspired than I was threatened and just kind of went for it. The first thing I did was build a sled so that I could easily move the rock. It didn't end up being so easy to move it but I do think it was the best way with the tools that I have. I also did this in the beginning so you can see this is a little bit rough maneuvering but I did it while the rock was whole before I started carving things out. Once I had it upright, I started marking things out and just looking for cracks. Take a look at this one here, this will come up later in the video. So now begins the extremely long and tedious task of sawing the stone. This particular stone, as you can tell, is granite. Granite is a very hard stone. Most sculptors work with a medium of marble, which on what geologists use as their hardness scale, called the Moss Scale for hardness. Marble is a 3. Granite is a 7. What makes this rock even harder is the fact that it has lots of veins of quartz running through it. Now quartz is even harder than granite, it's an 8 on the Moss Scale. So it was a very challenging cut. Granite in general is just a hard material to work with. The benefit is it's stronger. Here you can see that we've made these cuts. The next step is to chip that out with a jackhammer. You don't want to use too strong of a hammer because then you could risk splitting the sides. So we were using kind of medium strength jackhammers in terms of the scale jackhammers go. But the process is just cut and hammer out. You can see the shape starting to form here. Here we have the bench beginning to form. Lots of debris coming out. Estimated about 10,000 pounds being removed at this point. Making the rock around 15,000 pounds. The idea here, since just dragging this rock downhill on the sled tore the toe points that I put into it, the idea here was to lift the rock onto a trailer. Now my machine can only lift about 10,000 pounds. At the time I thought it might have been a little lighter but after doing some engineering math on it, it was definitely heavier than 10,000 pounds. So here we see a very frustrating day in an unsuccessful attempt to try and lift this up high enough to get a trailer underneath it. I was able to manage about 2 inches off the ground and that was it. So we kind of went back to the drawing board here and decided to take a little more weight out of the rock that we had wanted to take out anyways and go ahead and do the grinding down on the lower part of the property. We were going to drag it up to an easier spot to work on but decided just to keep it down there and shave the weight off of it and get it as light as we could before trying to move it and deciding the best route would be to use the sled again and to reinforce the toe points and give that a shot. So, didn't get that on video but it did work and we were able to drag it up to a higher spot on the property which gave me hope about putting it into its final location which was still probably 300 yards away. You can see here we began the very messy, very dirty process of grinding that just seemed to never end. And a special shout out to my friend Jaime. He's in Takayu. Very, very patient throughout this entire process of tedious grinding, cutting. We worked as a great team together, kind of tag teaming on certain things and he was a really good help getting this whole process done. Now, if you remember this crack from the beginning of the video it reared its ugly head once we had cut open and ground and kind of exposed the inside. You can see this crack goes all the way through into the interior of the tub. So, I spoke with a couple of my stone friends. Shout out to Carved Rock and to Steb's Design and went off of their advice and decided to seal the inside with some adhesive. This would help with the water not getting out into the interior of the crack. And here you can see I am drilling through either side of the crack in order to span it and place these stints in with epoxy. So, these were glued in with the epoxy which would help maintain the structure and shell of the rock if it were to continue to crack. This gave me some good insurance, especially when moving it and I think it beefed up the rock quite a bit. So, I feel pretty good about that. If you ever find yourself doing this task just be aware there will be some air pockets that you have to kind of push out and they'll work their way out but you kind of have to thread it in back and forth and they will work themselves out. Here we went over the super bond. We went over this with two part epoxy concrete crack repair and then we put the dust over that to help conceal and hide the cracks. Blend them in as best possible using the dust from the stone that we've been grinding. We did some on the outside down here. This will dry up and we'll wash that off. But that should help hide everything. Okay, so after that very tedious, stressful work this is the best part of any rock project and I saved this for the end just to maximize the enjoyment and this one did not disappoint. This rock has so much going on on the inside. You can see all of these veins and I hadn't seen the outside cleaned up yet. That was also very cool. Just inside and out absolutely beautiful, beautiful stone. Lots of quartz, lots of really neat striping and banding throughout. Just very, very unique all the way around from the cantilevered back to the big nose that kind of sinks into the ground later. Just very, very unique and all the irregularities just add up to an exquisite, exquisite stone. Okay, so the day had finally come and it was time to move this stone. So you can see here it's chained to the back of the bucket and also being towed from the tow points. This ended up being just a great way to go so as it was rocking back and wanting to fall off the sled the chain that is behind the stone would keep it upright and not allow it to drift back and slide off. So this was a great little improvement to the original way I had been towing it and it ended up working really, really well. When you're moving something this big there's almost always something that goes and in this case we almost got stuck there and the tire almost came off the bead but we aired it up a little bit and no worries. This section was pretty smooth sailing. It went very well. This was a tight little driveway to try and pull through. Everything tracked straight. The front tires were able to steer everything which was great. Sometimes when you're towing something really heavy or pushing something heavy with the bucket you have no control of the direction with the tires but in this case it was very cooperative and pretty easy to move it into place. I was really happy with this. So the idea here with this pole was to place the nose of this rock in there so that it would be at the correct height elsewhere and sit flat on the ground where it's final location was going to be. This was a little challenging but all in all it went pretty good. There's always a lot of moving setup and adjustment when you're moving something like this, of this size. You can fall into little holes and things like that. No worries. Just get your outrigger down. Get your back boom down. Wiggle out of it and move on. This part was a little stressful, a little uncomfortable. Pushing around this very finished thin shell that hadn't really been tested. I had the rebar in there to seal that crack. Just a very uneasy moment but I went as slowly as I could just trying to persuade it delicately nudging things gently and just trying to use as much finesse as humanly possible and mechanically possible maybe. But all in all it didn't have too much resistance. Fortunately we're going downhill here so just kind of inching it along and persuading it into its final spot and just taking the time. I think a more surefire way to do this would be to cut the bottom flat but I wanted the rock as strong as possible and as deep as possible so I opted not to and chose to set it in place and just get it leveled as much as possible. Here you can see we've kind of shimmed it around and got enough dirt and earth underneath it packed it, got it nice and level right where we wanted. Big success. Huge relief to have this thing in place. My god was that stressful and we're really glad to get that in place without cracking anything. We just pushed it off. This worked out really good. What I did was, two shipping container cutouts and then used two chain pulls and what I did is I used this extra material here because I needed some extra strength to really rip through. You can see I did a number on these kind of reinforcements but it stayed intact in the end. This is what happens when you don't do that. You can see on this one the chain just pulled right through and that was dragging it down the hill. So, those did quite a bit. So, here begins the process of core drilling a hole for drainage. I thought this was going to be about 8 inches deep. Turned out about 15 inches deep. Deeper than my drill bit here, the core drill. So, a little challenging but got through it. Just took probably two hours of drilling here with a really nice, good drill. It's a hard rock. A lot of material. Just took some time. You can see here that I had to move up to an extension on this drill in order to reach through the rock. So, next up was to dig a trench to shoot the water off. It comes out of the tub down into the desert and waters some desert bushes. So, we used an inch and a quarter pipe just to drain that out. You can see here how rocky the soil is. This gives you a good idea. There's the rocks just from digging that trench. The ones off to the side there as well. But, very challenging to dig here. But, hey, sometimes you find rocks that are so big you can make a boulder tub with them. Next step was to add a water line so you could fill the tub up. Ended up going with a 2-inch copper pipe. It would be rigid enough and we got that set to the height that we wanted to. You could still turn the valve on while you're in the tub. The concrete on the base to make that nice and structurally and visually. I did some deep thinking and came to the conclusion that the only way you could improve this rock was to put more rocks around it. So, got some nice flat pavers and set them in place and made a nice little ring around the rock so you could walk around it and not get your feet dirty. Again, one of my favorite parts, washing off and getting the reveal, seeing what kind of colors these stones are. I leave them dirty on purpose so it's kind of a surprise at the end and it just never disappoints. Here's some finished wet polishing. We ended up going to an 800 grit to get this nice and smooth. It came out extremely smooth, just really beautiful. This was the process, using an electric sander, the GFI, and just going over the whole surface inch by inch. This bench came out really beautiful. I love the way that vein interacts with the shape of the bench. Very comfortable to sit in. Seats three people comfortably. Four would be a bit cramped, but I think it could happen. Just absolutely gorgeous inside here. It's just stunning. For the drain, I ended up going with just a simple pop-up drain. Well, and here we have it. This is the completed, finished product and I could not be happier. It is so beautiful. Very challenging project. Very, very tedious, but definitely worth it in the end. I could not be happier with this thing. It's just gorgeous. It's so nice to sit in. You feel completely grounded when you're inside of it. The water comes from a well that is very nearby, about 60 feet away. It's very cold water. It's super refreshing in the summer. The whole project came out wonderful and I definitely would not do another one, but I'm very glad that I did this one. It's a very rewarding piece and one that I can look back with pride upon and be happy to be moving on to other stone projects. So I hope that this video was helpful in demonstrating just how challenging an undertaking like building a stone tub would be, although some people may be a little less naive than me and understand that that's just inherently difficult. But for those that don't, here's your warning. And for those that think like me, here's your inspiration. And I hope you find this helpful and you get some ideas from it. Happy to answer any questions. If you guys want to reach out, I'm going to put my contacts in the description. And if you guys want to see this thing in person, you can book the Mallow House. This is the rental property in Joshua Tree that we own where the rock is located. It's a beautiful, stunning mid-century gym with many rocks around it. And this one. Thanks everyone for watching.