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Pyramids: Cast, Poured, or Both?

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Author Topic: Pyramids: Cast, Poured, or Both?  (Read 9421 times)
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iwannano
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« Reply #90 on: May 30, 2009, 02:31:07 pm »

A couple of years back I started a thread on AR about this very topic because I bought a 2'x2'x2' block of limestone to carve a bowl. I used power tools to rough it out but work kept getting in the way of my fun so a little research led me to a site where I learned if I filled my rough bowl with regular household vinegar and left it covered when I returned a couple of days later I could just scoop out about a 1/2" to 3/4" of limestone goop from the sides and bottom of my bowl. This made the bowl carving much easier as all I did was scoop goop instead of actually working. I ended up with about a 5 gallon bucket of limestone goop and a fairly smooth bowl. I had read from the site if I was to add sodium hydroxide((lye) the site called it natron salt or something similar) to the goop it would harden. I had a couple of gecko interlocking paver molds so I applied some mold release, added lye to my goop and in no time flat I had a solid chunk of limestone whatever in the bucket. Nowhere in the information I read did it say the reaction would be that fast nor get so hot it softened the bucket.

Are the pyramids made from concrete? Who knows but vinegar for disolving limestone could have been available as well as lye to harden it back up. The disolving part is easy, controlling the hardening may also be easy but my experience ended with a bucket shaped clump(which was very hard BTW).

I posted the above on AR again but forgot to mention the about my experiments with granite. I had read that there were granite and basalt "vases" found that were very thin walled and very smooth. Stone cutters of today aren't sure how to recreate these but it was suggested that it would be possible to dissolve away the stone instead of trying to carve it which would induce stresses that would cause the thin walls to break. I tried vinegar to my granite but all it did was make my granite smell like a salad. I had some muratic acid and that caused a reaction. Although it didn't dissolve the stone it appeared to soften it to make scraping shapes considerably easier.

There are a number of  products on the market, some high tech and some low tech, that when mixed with water produce substances very stone like. Hydro-stone is low tech and has been around for a while and is used to cast stone-like pieces. Grancrete is more high tech(if you go by dollar amount) and it produces a material so hard and strong it is used to spray on foam panels to make supporting walls for houses. Fly ash is a substance that is scraped out of flues in coal power plants and when mixed with water produces a very hard stone like material, it is also used with concrete to improve various charateristics.

The logistics of casting a pyramid is just as daunting as carving blocks though. Weight is weight and moving 10 tons of a solid block or 10 tons of material to cast a block is about the same. The advantage of casting would be in not having to carve a perfect block before you haul it. The disadvantages of casting are controlling the set time, the heat the reaction generates and dealing with the inevitable burns from the lye(breathing the fumes from that stuff will kill you).
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