Granite is one of the most beautiful and luxurious building materials on earth. It’s used for indoor and outdoor home designing, as well as various outdoor structures. While most of us know the aesthetic and practical benefits of granite, you are probably unaware of where the stone actually comes from.

Nature’s Artwork

Many miles down, deep below the earth surface is where granite begins to be formed. Boiling molten rock called magma builds up pressure from the intense heat down there. It rises and seeps through cracks in the earth’s crust. As the magma rises it also solidifies and cools, turning into granite. Most of the granite remains buried under sedimentary rock, which makes up most of the earth’s surface.

Granite must then be extracted from the earth with as little damage to the rock as possible. Long and wide sections of the rock are outlined. These outlines tell them where to drill deep holes along rock. Explosive cables are wired down the holes, and when the explosives are set off, sections are broken off in the large sections. These large pieces are further broken down into sizes the manufacturers can handle, by using drills, steel pegs, plates, and wedges.

At the factory, the granite has to be cut using very large buzz saws. This is where slabs can be sliced off from the larger piece of granite material. The saw take a lot of time, about an hour to cut 22 square inches through hard rock. Additional saws are able to cut the granite down even further for use as the countertops. This machine combines several saws, all cutting the rock into individual slabs.

Once the slabs are cut, they are then ready to be turned into what we see as our kitchen and bathroom countertops. The granite goes through a polishing process, similar to sandpaper. It can go through a semi-gloss finish, or a high gloss finish. The more polishing heads it goes through, the higher the gloss will be.