You've got one chance

With my heart in my mouth, I have today sent off this piece of valuable, irreplaceable, antique, Breccia marble column to be cut into exactly two pieces by a sawyer who has already destroyed about £500 worth of other marble by cutting it into four pieces instead of the two that I asked for.

The trouble is that my regular sawyer  - the best in the West - is too busy to do this little task, so I have sent it with an instruction sheet - including drawings, photos and step-by-step explanations which I believe a small child could understand, but I am still haunted by the previous mistake.

To a great extent, the previous wrong cutting was my own fault, because I had drawn a 90 degree cross in the middle of it to mark the absolute centre, which is a technique used daily by all masons, but because I didn't rub it out, the sawyer cut right through the middle of both lines, destroying the marble. The trouble is that many sawyers are not masons.

I have also made life as easy as I could for the sawyer by setting the column in a cosy cradle of polyurethane insulation board which can be cut straight through without the blade even knowing it is there, so the marble does not have to be chocked-up on the bed of the saw to stop it rolling off during cutting. I have placed cable-ties either side of the cut so as to lessen the chance of the column being shifted out of true by the sawyer pushing the diamond blade through too fast.

Another consequence of pushing the blade through too fast would be the breaking off of some of the different, harder or softer bits which make up the conglomerate which is Breccia, but I have asked him that - if this should happen - he should save the little bits for me to glue back in later, but since they would probably fall into a deep slurry of liquid mud stone-dust, the chance of him spotting them flying off at high speed are almost zero.

What could possibly go wrong?