--- title: CNC Stone Carving | daily.dev description: CNC machines now carve ornate Gothic stonework that once took skilled carvers months, in a matter of days. The Carmelite Monks use 5 and sometimes 6 axis stone... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/cnc-stone-carving-dhhotfzi8 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: CNC Stone Carving | daily.dev og:description: CNC machines now carve ornate Gothic stonework that once took skilled carvers months, in a matter of days. The Carmelite Monks use 5 and sometimes 6 axis stone... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/cnc-stone-carving-dhhotfzi8 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/DhhOtfzI8.png og:image:alt: CNC Stone Carving og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # CNC Stone Carving **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary CNC machines now carve ornate Gothic stonework that once took skilled carvers months, in a matter of days. The Carmelite Monks use 5 and sometimes 6 axis stone carving CNC machines from Prussiani Engineering, based in Bergamo, Italy, which use diamond tipped blades and milling bits, with water used for cooling and washing away sludge. A typical 40 hour work week of carving can be done by a CNC machine in under 2 days. The workflow runs from an artist sculpting in 3D modeling software, to CNC programmers creating toolpaths in CAM software and Gcode, to sawyers who set up stones and operate the machines. A coding mistake once caused a machine to pound and shatter several 7 foot stone window sills overnight. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How many axes does a CNC stone carving machine typically have? Stone carving CNC machines used for sculptures and foliage typically have 5 axes, moving left-right, up-down, front-back, and rotating the head in two ways. Some machines add a 6th axis, usually a lathe or turntable, for carving tall pieces like pinnacles or statues, interpolating with the other axes to reach every area of the stone. _Anyone speccing out a stone or materials CNC setup can keep track of workflow details like this on daily.dev._ ### How much faster is CNC stone carving compared to hand carving? A CNC machine can complete roughly 40 hours of carving work, a typical human work week, in less than 2 days, since it can run unattended overnight. Ornate pieces that previously took a skilled carver months can now be finished in a matter of days using CNC machining with diamond tipped blades and milling bits. _Developers weighing automation timelines for physical fabrication projects can follow workflow comparisons like this on daily.dev._ ### What causes a CNC machine to damage the workpiece during an unattended carving run? A mistake in the Gcode batch sent to the machine can cause it to repeatedly pound into a finished piece after carving is otherwise complete. In one case, bad code told a CNC machine to hammer down into the top of several 7-foot stone window sills overnight, shattering stones weighing hundreds of pounds each; the machine itself survived and kept working for nearly a decade afterward. _Anyone debugging unattended automated machining runs can find cautionary workflow notes like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 158 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-28). **TL;DR:** Discussion centers less on the technology itself and more on whether CNC-carved stonework preserves the meaning of Gothic architecture, with people split between admiring the practical craft-preservation angle and mourning the loss of devotional, labor-intensive meaning; there's also a healthy side-thread on technical/practical details of the machines and monastic economics. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 55% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - Many see CNC as a pragmatic way to keep ornate stonework and historic building repair economically viable when traditional hand-carving isn't affordable. - Some note the Sagrada Família and other modern projects already use CNC successfully, showing the approach can produce genuinely excellent results. - Several point out that automation and mechanical reproduction (pointing machines, molds, templates) have always been part of sculptural tradition, so this isn't a radical break. - A few hope the technology could enable a broader revival of ornate, beautiful architecture that's currently too costly to build. **The pushback** - Some argue the meditative, devotional value of hand-carving is intrinsic to monastic life and is lost when a machine does the work. - Others feel the resulting buildings are a 'facsimile' lacking the emotional weight of structures built through generations of human sacrifice and effort. - A few raise skepticism that CNC stone equipment is actually cheap or simple to operate at scale, citing maintenance, workholding, and skilled-operator requirements. - Concern that ornate CNC output could become mass-produced 'McCathedral' kitsch without genuine artistic/aesthetic training behind the designs. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Debate splits between philosophical concerns about losing the meaning/devotion behind hand-carved cathedrals and practical enthusiasm for preserving craft and enabling more ornate architecture, alongside a separate thread of technical curiosity about the machines and monastery logistics. **Hottest debate:** Whether using CNC machines to carve cathedral stonework preserves or hollows out the spiritual/devotional meaning traditionally embodied in centuries of hand-carved construction. **Open questions** - Would monks in earlier centuries have actually used such technology if available, and would it have changed the meaning of their work? - Can broader society realistically afford or culturally justify a return to highly ornate architecture now that CNC makes it technically feasible? - How much of the detailed modeling and artistic judgment is still done by skilled humans versus automated in practice? **Highlights** > This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process. A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways. I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Versailles. > — [roughly on hackernews · 7 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50275588) > Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out). As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions. Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs. So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic. > — [wolframhempel on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50275842) > I think a good theory is: Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors. This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time. (and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not) See Tom Wolfe's excellent From Bauhaus to Our House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House Also this ACX discussion (it's a few posts) is really good: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-t... We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful. These people are trying: https://www.humanise.org/ > — [NoImmatureAdHom on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276836) > The machines they use are unusual.[1] Multi-axis CNC saws are not a common type of CNC machine. The cutting technique is quite different from metal machining. The software for this is really niche.[2] Quite impressive.[3] There's a whole industry grinding out marble bathtubs, granite countertops, decorative friezes, and other McMansion stuff. So there's a market for the machinery. [1] https://prussiani.com/en/ [2] https://www.dmrsoftware.com/wcam2k-eng.html [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etX33jp20pY > — [Animats on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945226) > I hope they're training them in classical sculpture as well, even if it's just in Zbrush. Otherwise it'll just be mass manufactured McCathedrals. There's no substitute for aesthetic training. However, that being given, using any tools available to extend an artisan's abilities and output is obviously the right move. > — [boppo1 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942998) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274409) · 272 points · 104 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33940043) · 164 points · 54 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Rock Sphere Machine Produces Off The Charts Satisfaction](https://daily.dev/posts/rock-sphere-machine-produces-off-the-charts-satisfaction-dworzcftj) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [A desktop CNC router with 710W spindle tested with UGS and Easel software](https://daily.dev/posts/a-desktop-cnc-router-with-710w-spindle-tested-with-ugs-and-easel-software-mrlo19lj3) · CNX Software · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [MachinaCheck: Building a Multi-Agent CNC Manufacturability System on AMD MI300X](https://daily.dev/posts/machinacheck-building-a-multi-agent-cnc-manufacturability-system-on-amd-mi300x-v66osope7) · Hugging Face · 8 upvotes · 0 comments - [Sculpting Bas-Reliefs on a Stone Wall in a Forest Environment](https://daily.dev/posts/sculpting-bas-reliefs-on-a-stone-wall-in-a-forest-environment-sd6ujbbgx) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#manufacturing](https://daily.dev/tags/manufacturing) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/cnc-stone-carving-dhhotfzi8) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"CNC Stone Carving","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/cnc-stone-carving-dhhotfzi8","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/cnc-stone-carving-dhhotfzi8"},"datePublished":"2026-10-28T16:11:15.574Z","dateModified":"2026-10-28T19:38:13.028Z","description":"CNC machines now carve ornate Gothic stonework that once took skilled carvers months, in a matter of days. 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