Glueing stone to metal

Dear Count,

If you stick it to metal differential expansion rates with changing ambient temperature [especially in an outdoor setting] will cause either the glue to fail or cracks to occur in any case.

The solution would be to mount it onto a piece of similar material, and with stone the real answers would be to talk to a monumental stonemason about the correct fixing to use for outdoor use. I am sure the expertise to do this permanently and very well does exist.

The first thing that struck me was to use Araldite, but I am fairly sure this would fail over time, thinking about it.

George

If you want to be able to remove it you might be best supporting the weight from below with some lip or protected pins. Then hold it from falling with some L-shaped retaining "things". Don't tighten anything to much.

Otherwise - would cement or mortar not be the usual 'glue' - leaving out the metal plate.

I believe mussels do a fantastic job in this sort of task - not sure if the boffins have got past admiration to imitation yet.

Gripfill.


Willy.

speak to a local brick technical services , they will be able to bond your stone sculpture to your brickwork

neil

Never mind how, why?

Thanks George, I agree with everything you say.

Thanks Adam, I did think of supporting it from below as you say, but I fear stress cracks could start from the supporting pins. I agree that cement would be a permanent solution, but the walls are rendered and I don't trust the rendering. Maybe remove the rendering in the contact area? I'm afraid the mussels advice went over my head, as you've lost me... not for the first time. I must move to France once I've retired, as it seems to open the mind.

Yes Willy, maybe Gripfill.

Don't be shy doc, if you want one of these pieces, you only have to ask.

I'll be back with an update.

quote:

Originally posted by count.d:
... I'm afraid the mussels advice went over my head, as you've lost me... not for the first time.

"Nothing quite beats the intransigence of a mussel.
From glands in its sluglike foot, the animal secretes a glue that in less than five minutes hardens into a filament, or byssal thread, that will tether it for life to an intertidal rock. Within a few days, it has anchored its shell by a cable of several hundred such threads that will withstand years of pounding surf. Mussel glue can resist forces of a thousand pounds per square inch. Mussels can stick to Teflon.


Mussels cling to rocks with polymers that are stronger and more waterproof than anything found in a hardware store. What we learn from them may also lead to a good anti-glue.
Photograph by Jonathan Kantor

"I've gained an enormous respect for these creatures," Herbert Waite, a marine biochemist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says. "They live in an environment of turbulence. They can't afford to make something flimsy."

Humans, alas, can and do. Our superglues, Krazy Glues, and specialized industrial glues work spectacularly well on dry land. Submerged, however, they pale in comparison with the mussel's product. "There's no glue that can do that underwater," Waite says. "If you went to the store, bought epoxy, and mixed it underwater, it would be a flimsy bond." For years researchers have sought in vain to mimic nature and create a glue that will bond quickly and firmly when wet; surgeons and naval repairmen, among others, are eager for such a product. At last the tide is turning. Thanks in part to years of research by Waite, a synthetic, pseudo-mussel glue appears to be close at hand."

quote:

Originally posted by count.d:
Don't be shy doc, if you want one of these pieces, you only have to ask.

.

A tempting offer, but I'm not greatly troubled by Jehovah's Witnesses where we live. I may stick a few mussels on my front door though.

quote:

Originally posted by count.d:
Don't be shy doc, if you want one of these pieces, you only have to ask.

Be (VERY) careful what you ask for:

Y'AI'NG'NGAH
YOG-SOTHOTH
H'EE-L'GEB
F'AI TRHODOG
UAAAAH

"There is no peace at the gates."

I think Adam has just put curse on me.

Thanks for the info on mussels Adam, I feel even more sorry now when I drop them into a pan of boiling water.

quote:

Originally posted by Adam Meredith:

quote:

Originally posted by count.d:
Don't be shy doc, if you want one of these pieces, you only have to ask.

Be (VERY) careful what you ask for:

Y'AI'NG'NGAH
YOG-SOTHOTH
H'EE-L'GEB
F'AI TRHODOG
UAAAAH

"There is no peace at the gates."

So along with all his other skills he also seems to speak some weird dialect of Enochian, or is that from the Necronomicon?

Whatever, I suggest you don't cross him as you may get blasted!

Klingon maybe?

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:
Klingon maybe?

Now you mention it does have that 'twang' to it.

quote:

Originally posted by Adam Meredith:
"There is no peace at the gates."

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian - the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.


"Nor is it to be thought" (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) "that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again."