Duration: 3:50

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4

So, I'm carving a discworld troll to sit on a brick in a friend's house, guarding his Pratchett books. This means cutting out a brick-shaped hole in the block first. "How hard can that be?", I hear you ask.

This sandstone is really touch stuff - instantly blunted my steel tools. Very glad of the tungsten carbide ones I got from tiranti (http://www.tiranti.co.uk/) this summer.

The brick-shaped hole needed to have fairly square sides so that wherever I put the figurine over the top of it, it would sit snugly on the brick.

Getting the surfaces both flat and square was a real effort. It took about 2 days worth of carving in all. By the end of it, I was starting to feel the bumps and curves in the surfaces through the chisel head, but there was still no substitute for getting out my trusty metal ruler, laying it on the surface and seeing which bits where proud.

Next, I need to cut the stone along the lines you can see in the final image. I'm not doing that by hand! Got a grinder blade. Hopefully, I'll be able to harvest some usable stone from the off-cuts.