Re: An attitude based on unfounded snobbery
"while it has been shown that adding an abrasive material such as sand and lubrication can indeed help to cut using copper, this again, is just a possible theory that is unlikely to ever be proved."
Nowadays if you want to cut stone with a smooth surface you use a diamond saw. My uncles who ran a quarry retired without even installing one. They did a lot of stone cutting, however. Their reciprocating "saw" didn't actually have teeth or anything like that, all it did was move sand back and forward. If you have plenty of man-hours available it's surprising what you can do with simple means. Technology allows you to do things faster and more cheaply but if you don't rate those attributes highly you don't necessarily need the technology.