luckilymynameisanon

Southern Alberta monument production and stone setter here. We follow a pretty similar system for "out of town" orders where we have less than 5 or so stones in a run. If we get into the larger stones we have a flat deck 1 ton with a small hoist, and a 5 ton flat deck with a knuckle crane and massive boom. For in town orders we use the 5 ton just because we can fit up to 30 Memorials and bang them out pretty quickly off of the truck.

What do you guys use for levelling the stones, just a shovel and long pry bar? Or do you not deal in that kind of maintenance?

Production guy here, not associated with OP, but I work in a monument company in Alberta, Canada that both handles production and installation.

The granite is mined, shipped to a production facility, and then cut to size, polished and otherwise "finished" with laser etching, hand carving ect. From there the lettering and more basic designs are produced in a CAD program and cut into heavy stencil. We then glue the stencil to the monument and remove the area that will be cut into the stone. We then place the granite in a sandblast booth and have an automated sandblaster that runs over the stone multiple times.

Different colours require different times in the booth. For example, blacks and dark colours often receive what is called "two pass" which basically means we run the sandblaster over it twice and the contrast between the unpolished and polished stone is more than enough to garauntee a low maintenance, long lasting, easy to read finish. Pinks and greys may require hundreds of passes. We use a proprietary mix for our abrasive in our sandblaster which minimizes wear on our equipment while efficiently cutting the stone.

From sandblasting the stone is stripped, cleaned, and made ready for transport to the installation site.

I would be happy to answer any other questions on production for you.

Interesting, we have't seen any of that. Maybe it's just a cemetery maintenance issue? Mind you, the reason we are required to use them is so the cemetery can move the stones as a single unit when mowing.

Ah, makes sense! We use a piece of 2x4 or 4x4 with our 5' pry bar, which we have had bent to give us a little extra leverage. Do you guys also use tremco as an adhesive? I noticed below that you used pennies as spacers, I would be concerned that they may oxidize and stain the granite? We use vinyl spacers where we have to, but otherwise we do not use spacers.

Yeah... trade name is technically "Rose", although there are "Reds". The pink posted above is similar to a "Laurentian Pink" which has a darker, tighter grain. There are others that look closer to the colour of strawberry flavoured milk. The number of actually colours is just insane. We don't deal with Chinese granite all that much, mostly Canadian Produced granite, but the sheer number of colours is mind boggling.