Sturgist

😞 nope. It'd be cool as fuck though! I would love to use it as like an accent on a fireplace or on a wall. I think it would match really well with a dark granite or a lighter basalt.

Thanks! This has been really fun!

Life's interesting enough without having to revolve around drama, too many people watching too much daytime TV....smfh

I do have a mason's mark, I haven't registered it though.

Way ahead of you. I technically work for the government doing conservation on historic monuments. Tidy pension, salary wage, not pressed hard, and possibly moving into a management position soon. I miss the outside world, and the sedentary pace here fucks me off, but it's well easier on my body.

The thing with apprentices is absolutely real. We just had an apprentice who has essentially fired himself. He's got talent, if he wasn't so up his own ass with entitlement and had an actual work ethic, he could be the real McCoy. And that's around half the apprentices I've dealt with. I'd love to blame it on the youth and lack of gumption or whatever, but it's just people not wanting to work hard....

Which one?

Do you have access to explosives?

As I said in a different comment:

Honestly just kinda fell into it. Was working in a warehouse and hated it. Just walked off one day, called a friend just to complain about it and the firm he was working for happened to be hiring. I was 18, I'm now a few months away from 40.

For the bonus: I left and did other stuff here and there, few years of demolition, but always ended up back at a masonry firm. I'm good at it. It's heavy work, but there's a lot of thinking involved. Sometimes you spend 3 times as long thinking about how a stone is going to go in around various obstructions without damaging anything than it takes to actually fit the stone. It's mentally stimulating and physically taxing. I guess to take the long way to answering your question, I always wanted to do masonry as soon as I started it. I only left for something else due to shitty bosses.

Absolutely horrendous at sand castles.

Both, but it also depends on what style of stone is being laid. The examples I've put up are all random. For ashlar you'll have either a set pattern of sizes, or a small selection of sizes. You'll still end up cutting pieces smaller due to needing a proper bond and keeping the pattern.

I am not a Freemason.

Not yet! In my day to day job things are heavily dictated by engineers and architects. And when what jobs I take on the side actually require permitting and inspection I pay an engineer to go over my design and confirm I'm within regulation and the customer is required to get the appropriate permits and schedule inspections.

Masonry is kinda dying. In Canada it's considered unskilled labour. So no certs, no training other than what you get on the job. The UK has a few different certificates depending on what country. England has a Vocational Qualification for Fixing(installation) and used to do multi-trade, Banker/Fixer(cutting/carving and installing), but have recently moved Banker to an arts bachelor. Scotland is still has a multi-trade qualification, but it's actually really really hard to get. You need to have a quota of stones you have carved, but they need to be installed on a building. There's also very few colleges left in Scotland that even offer a masonry course.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there's a lot of cowboy outfits, and not many masons that do an actually good job. Fewer people are willing to get into it, and there's more people just kinda winging it.

Fuck yeah I have! Am I any good at it? Not so much.....

The sink is likely sitting on a frame, probably wood. There should be clips holding it in place under the counter top. It should be as simple as removing the screws/bolts on the clips, cutting the seal around the edge, and lift-sliding it out.

If you send me a picture of the underside at one of the sides I'll be able to get a bit more specific.

Well. The Freemasons started in Scotland. It's generally accepted that the first Freemason temple was the Chapel at Stirling Castle. There's some masons I've met here that think the Freemasons have the registry of Mason's Marks. They may have in the past, but I believe that currently the Worshipful Company of Masons holds most of the UK's mason's marks. Could be debatable, the English gonna empire after all.

A mason's mark was used to show who cut the stone, and who fixed it. It was how masons were paid for what they'd done.

In modern times the Freemasons is....a boy's club. There's likely very few actual masons who are members. Where I am in Scotland, most of the lodges are within a short walk from a police station,or what used to be one.

From the few conversations I had back home about them the general consensus is that it's a bit of a joke that their "secret knowledge" is mostly just masonry best practice.