The scale effect of natural and artifically induced rock fractures and replicas up to a 500 mm length are experimentally studied by direct shear tests in a testing program including a newly manufactured large shear testing equipment. The fractures are chatacterised pre-, syn-, and post-shear test. Combinations of different measurements provide a high-quality dataset enabling deeper understanding of, and constitutive model development for rock fractures used for safety assessment of deep geological respoitories for nuclear waste disposal.