In this paper, we present an apparatus developed to measure stone bulk density by a mercury-displacement method. Due to the high surface tension of mercury, the presence of rough surfaces in the samples may cause overestimation of the bulk volume by up to about + 0.1 %. Instead, accuracies of better than ± 0.03 % can be attained on marble and monzogranite samples of about 35 cm3 volume by polishing the sample surface with 800 mesh emery paper and using a balance with a sensitivity of 0.01 g. The same measurement precision can be attained on much smaller samples simply by using a more precise balance.

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