Manufacturing technologies Tsar Bath

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In Tsarskoye Selo, on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park, there are the ruins of the Babolovsky Palace. Inside the octagonal tower you will see giant granite bowl, a colossal monolithic pool of red granite, about two meters high and more than 5 meters in diameter.

This is how he was originally

A stone miracle is installed inside. The bath was made by Samson Ksenofontovich Sukhanov.

Officially, the information about the manufacture of the bath is as follows: in 1818, a granite block weighing more than 160 tons was delivered to Babolovo from one of the Finnish islands. (I still don't understand how it was delivered inland - 27 miles across rough terrain?) … All that was left for the masters was to cut off all that was superfluous (120 tons). The work took 10 years and was completed on time with the highest quality. The result is a polished granite bathtub: height 196 cm, depth 152 cm, diameter 533 cm, weight 48 tons. Displacement data 8 thousand buckets. The wall thickness of the bowl is minimal - 45 cm.

After the stone-cutting work was completed, walls were erected around the bath - an octagonal tower. Along the perimeter of the room, cast-iron walkways with railings, ramps, and viewing platforms were made on brackets. The work was completed in 1829, 4 years after the death of the customer, Alexander I.

Many are puzzled by the fact that there is no drain hole in the Bath, and there are no technical possibilities for supplying and heating water. But this is not the case. The photo will be below.

A small video with information about the Tsar Bath:

Bathtub size versus human height

The bath may not be finished, i.e. surface without polishing

Throughout the entire time, from the moment I learned about the existence of such a product, the question does not leave me: why are our ministries not reconstructing the building, why not making an interesting place for tourists? After all, this is in any case the achievement of our masters of the past! This needs to be preserved and the information disseminated. Or are they afraid that people will start asking uncomfortable questions?Which? For instance, about manufacturing technology … Are there any stone-cutting industries in our time that could undertake such work …

Let's move on to manufacturing technologies for this bath. Let's start with the most recent and most controversial version:

1. Stamping casting

To immediately understand this version, look at the process of making concrete flowerpots somewhere in Southeast Asia:

Here's another similar example:

Thanks to peshkints from livejournal for the stated version here

A hole from the pipe remains in the center of the flowerpot. It is poured and smoothed with concrete while it has not yet set. It turns out that there is a hole in the center of the Tsar Bath. And it is not referred to as drain, because diameter is too small. But as a hole from a pipe when stamping using this technology - quite. Only it is not clear why the masters did not close him up?

Hole in the Tsar Bath

Many readers will say that the video is concrete. And the Tsar Bath is granite. No connection. There are many facts that artificial granite could be created from mixtures. I have shown examples in my articles "Casting Stone Blocks" (in the livejournal).

Here is one of the recipes for imitating the composition for granite:

Tell me who tested this recipe? There is no such information. And if the recipe is working? And if one of the many? So, I would not rule out the possibility of making Tsar Bath and similar granite products from compositions very similar or repeating natural granite. In addition, I believe that natural granite is not an igneous rock, but mineral, fossilized or crystallized mud masses emerging from the depths.

2. Making from a granite block

I gave a brief official information about this above. It turns out that there are references to the manufacture of similar products in the 19-20th centuries:

Lustgarten Granite Bowl

70 tons, manufactured in 1826-1827. The initial processing of the profile of the bowl, made of 225 tons of granite slab, was carried out directly in the quarry by 20 stonecutters, after which the bowl was moved with the help of rollers to the port, to the barge.

Granite bowl in a grinding workshop. Figure 1831. The tooling is very similar to the patterns from the stamping of flowerpots in the video above.

She used to stand like this

An illustration of the installation process.

Another similar product:

In 1910, a fountain bowl was made from a 65-ton block of granite for Union Station Plaza in Washington. Processing was carried out manually according to templates, using 4 and 6 blade hammers. A turntable was used for the first time in polishing. The polishing was done with iron irons, felt discs and polishing pastes.

I did not find information on her.

As you can see, either the masters still knew how to make such masterpieces from multi-ton granite blocks. Moreover, they knew how to deliver these blocks to the place of manufacture and knew how to install them.

Or they want to give us the technology of modeling from artificial granite for the skill of processing this hard rock … What do you think?