My grandfather was a monumental sculptor, in other words he made grave stones. He started when he was 14 years old in Scotland and worked at that for his entire life up until he passed away about 10 years ago now at the age of 84.
Everything used to be done by hand using a hammer and chisel. Then they started using rubber stencils for the designs and sandblasting the stones. Both of these methods were quite time consuming one man could do 3 or 4 stones a day sandblasting, which was a lot better than 1 stone every few days when using hammer and chisel.
Now everything is all automated using computer hardware and software. Companies setup using these advanced techniques can pump out an enormous amount of stones daily. I would estimate roughly 20 stones per day give or take a few, which is a tremendous improvement from when it was all done by hand.
It's one of the only businesses that still thrive during a depression. I always remember my grandfather having as much work as he wanted even turning work away at times because he had more than he could handle by himself. He would also usually take a few months off during the winter as that was the slow period. It wasn't that less people were dieing during this time but the ground around here would freeze making it difficult to dig the hole to put the stone in. This made spring an especially busy time from the backlog of orders taken during the winter months.
His motto was "People are dieing for my services!!"
