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Stone Shifting
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nigelswift
8112 posts

Re: Stone Shifting
Aug 23, 2003, 08:17
You’re not the first Chippie in history to ask people to have faith and follow him. I suspect the first one wouldn’t have started on this website, which is notable for it’s lack of people of that persuasion. However, they’re pretty hot on shamans, so maybe you have a chance!

I’ll tell you the bits I’m convinced about, and then the bits I need to understand better…

First, shifting the stones. I’m certain you’ve come up with the right way. From a mechanical point of view, all other methods have meant a huge amount of ground friction remained. Even at Easter Island, where they may have “walked” the sledge, one side then the other, they still had that. The BBC, with their greased trackway, still had it, so they needed hundreds of people, and they reckoned 56lb of sarsen weight per person was optimum. Your method is virtually frictionless and from my little experiments I absolutely accept that you’ll be able to achieve something approaching your aim of one ton per person. So that, alone, convinces me you’ll be able to achieve something unique and spectacular.

Second, raising the lintels. I know this can be done either quickly or with very few people, since the link I gave shows that it can even be done with just two men.

The areas where I’m less clear are all to do with placing the uprights. Do you have a fail-safe method of doing it accurately? Can it be developed through experimentation? If you do it right once, can you be sure you can repeat it with the “big one” that you haven’t experimented on? More to the point, can the raised lintel be easily moved horizontally and can the uprights be easily wriggled into the correct position to fit with it? A certain amount of fine adjustment is bound to be needed to make a fit. OK, the BBC did it, but can we be sure that they they didn’t just get lucky with the way the uprights went in?

We had a bit of a discussion about lintel positioning here
http://www.stonepages.com/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=189&s=eb50abb05a1b87c1e84f379447980980
and the point was made that the mortice and tenon joints, with their conical shape, may have been more in the nature of positional indicators. It seems to me that if one on the uprights ended up wrongly positioned you could still make a stable trilithon although it might look slightly wonky. I haven’t seen the mortise holes in the BBC lintel but it seems to me if they were elongated rather than circular you’d have a better chance of overcoming any locational imprecision without having to pull the uprights out of vertical. It would be cheating, granted, but what the heck. Maybe we should have a reserve lintel for in case we don’t get the uprights correct.

Sorry for raising stuff that I’m sure you’ve gone into long ago, and may seem naïve, but I’d just like to be clear what you’re planning.
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