Where We Cut Granite

Today I want to talk to you guys about where granite actually comes from.

Everyone always asks me, how do they mine this stuff? Is it quarried in the United States? Where is this stuff coming from?

To simply put it, 90% comes from Brazil. That’s the dominant country of origin, where they’re quarrying the blocks of granite. It comes out on these blocks that literally look like blocks used at the Egyptian pyramids.

We quarry those, then take them to the processing plant. That’s where they use a wire saw usually, a diamond wire saw, and they cut these blocks like slices of bread. Now, this takes hours, not minutes. But they cut them like slices of bread into basically an inch and a quarter thick granite slabs. Maybe a block will be anywhere from 20 to 40 slabs, once they’re cut into an inch and a quarter. Then they’ll take those slabs, they’re going to resin them first.

90% of all granite’s resined. What resin does, is it fills in the voids. There are natural voids in rocks. Even though granite is one of the densest natural stones on the face of the planet, it still has voids in it that they want to plug up at the quarry as much as they can. So it’ll go through the resining processes.

The higher tech processing plants have an actual commercial dryer that speeds up the resin, where they’re actually going to load it into a vertical dryer that has maybe 35 slots all the way through. Just a huge oven, so to speak. They’re going to dry that for X amount of hours to speed the process, versus just leaving them on a table to dry naturally.

Once it comes out of the oven, they’re going to take it to the polishing session. Then it goes into inspection. They make sure they catch all the holes if there’s a crack. Then they load it up and they send it in shipping containers, and it gets to the suppliers. Or in some cases, some fabricators like us, who occasionally import directly from the company processing in Brazil. And then we take it and we cut it, and you can refer to our How We Cut Granite video blog to see how we cut it and manufacture it.

Glad you guys joined us. I hope that helped you visualize a little more of that process of basically mountain to block, to slabs, across the water to us, where we cut it ourselves and then install it in your kitchen.