Building Peace Ep. 10: Why Every Millimeter Counts

Dear Supporters,



Two weeks ago I was back on the shop floor at Quarra Stone Co. in Madison, Wis., where carving of the Park’s world map is well into production. Most of what the team and I saw that day was the steady rhythm of a project at work: pavers of Virginia Mist granite perched below robotic carving arms tapering down into a slender grinding tip, gently removing the dense stone to achieve each one’s unique shape and pattern.

Then one of Quarra’s technicians showed us how they check that precision work, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

He held a small scanner over a finished paver and moved it slowly back and forth, as if he were painting it. On a computer monitor nearby, the surface filled in as a 3-D digital rendering, to be compared with the digital model that guided its carving, point by point.

The Leica AT960-LR laser tracking system is a technology more commonly used in aerospace and automotive engineering (think Formula 1 racing) than in carving granite, but Quarra believes in precision. The scanner maps an object from any position and angle in space, captured to the nearest micron.

Quarra’s standard for our pavers is that every part of every piece must fall within one millimeter of the design. Meet that, and the paver passes. More than that, and the radiating layout of the pavers means that small errors would compound by the outer sixth or seventh rings into much larger ones. 

And when a section reads even 0.730 millimeters high (thinner than a credit card, and well within accepted tolerance), they’ll keep going: A craftsman will work it down by hand, bringing it as close to zero as their tools and skill will allow.

No visitor would ever see a difference that small, but they do it anyway, even on the paver I watched being scanned that day, which holds no land at all. It’s an open stretch of ocean in the South Pacific, but it’s going to be set in stone forever, so getting it right matters.

Each of the 271 machined pavers in this map gets one chance to be right before it’s set into the ground a short walk from the U.S. Capitol, where it will remain, in tribute, for generations.

Quarra is getting every piece right, down to a fraction of a millimeter. What remains is getting those pieces home. Installation in Washington, D.C., the final phase of construction, can begin only once the Park is fully funded.

We are building something for forever, and you can still be part of it.

Yours in service,

Glenn A. Blumhorst
Chief Advancement Officer
Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation

President and CEO, National Peace Corps Association (2013-22)
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Guatemala (1988-91)

GBlumhorst@PeaceCorpsCommemorative.org

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PEACE CORPS COMMEMORATIVE FOUNDATION

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