Robatoy wrote:
....
Granite is not all created equal. You will see a diamond cutter take
his wedge, look at it carefully and give the stone a whack..it splits.
The hardest stuff known is diamond. Yet, there are fissures.

The diamond cleaves, not along a "fissure" but along the underlying
crystal facets or planes.

Granite is not a ductile material even as compared to cast iron. It has
excellent compressive strength, thermal stability, doesn't rust, etc.,
.... _BUT_ it doesn't have any significant bending resistance and is far
more likely to fracture under a moderate impact than cast iron.

The two materials are so differing in their properties it's unlikely you
can even find equivalent measured values for them -- there's no
essentially no such thing as "ultimate strength" or "yield strength" for
stone as well as a measured Young's modulus.

I've no real idea how well these new tops will hold up in normal use but
the disadvantages still seem to have much going against as the pluses
have going for them to me. Time will tell, I suppose. If they're
really a great thing, they'll take over; otherwise it'll just be a
relatively short-lived fad. (The latter would be my guess at the moment)

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