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Forty years ago after I started out my career all marble edge polishing was performed by hand. In the present day such work is finished completely by machine however there are still circumstances where hand polishing would be a useful skill to know.

Traditionally edge polishing was considered a separate semi-skilled trade. These polishers spent their whole working day rubbing hundreds of ft of marble edges and would develop strange physical deformities, bulging shoulder muscles and a thumb that will curve back and contact their own wrist were the most typical!

The process would start as soon as the sides to be polished had been recognized, giant areas of marble slabs, as an illustration the cladding on commercial buildings would be laid out on big benches and pattern matched. The exposed edges that required polishing maybe hundreds of ft, could be identified and marked.

One at a time every slab can be propped upright in opposition to a bench with the edge to be polished uppermost. Just to hand can be a bucket of water, a sponge and a rag cloth.

The work was carried out utilizing numerous grades of carborrundum stone blocks and to start would be a rough 60 or 80 grit stone. This can be the longest stage of the work as the sting of the marble would have quite deep ‘wheel marks’ left by the diamond saw blades from the cutting. The stone could be dipped into the water after which rubbed evenly up and down the sting of the slab always keeping a heavy and steady pressure on. The tough corners of the marble could be additionally rubbed off to create a small flat corner called an arris.

Now and again the marble had to be dried to check on progress, this was achieved by whirling the rag within the air above the work. This is still the most effective way of drying massive areas of wet stone by the way!

Once all the wheel marks and different deep scratches had been removed with the 60 grit he would move on to the second stone, this time a a hundred and twenty grit, just a bit finer than the previous stone. This stone would be used till all of the scratches from the earlier grit had been removed fully and replaced by a new layer of finer scratches.

Polishing marble is actually the process of wearing down the surface with finer and finer scratches until the scratches are no longer visible to the naked eye!

This process continues through at the very least six different grits of abrasive down to a 500 or 600 grit. The ultimate stone used was a really fine block made by the polishers themselves from ultra fine carborundum dust and marble glue, and strangely called snake!

At this point the marble surface is still not highly polished. It has just a very smooth honed finish. The ultimate stage is achieved with a hard block of felt and a cocktail of various polishing powders, probably the most commonly used had been putty powder, pumice powder and oxalic acid. One or all of those would be used wet or just damp to provide the final gloss.

The obvious advantage of hand polishing is that this process does not create clouds of dust, as the work is carried out wet, This means that unlike dry machine polishing, there was little severe health risk to the polishers. The quality of the finished polish was also superior to machine polishing leaving a higher polish, smaller arrises and a flat surface.

Nonetheless, hand polishing is a severely gradual and laborious process. Machine edge polishing is way quicker, and within three or 4 years of the appearance of edge polishing machines the artwork of hand polishing marble had all however disappeared.

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