Stone mason query

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

Hi all.

Our community garden is located on the site of a victorian town house which was demolished in the late 60s.

We dug up a little bit of stone that kept blunting our lawn mower blade.

Turned out to be a bigger job than we thought.

Its a lump of dressed sandstone, with obvious tool marke on the rear and lower faces but clean chiselled surfaces on the top and front. There are two slots cut into the top face. Underneath mortar still bonded to the stone face.

Does anyone know what part of a house this looks like, it woukd be nice to see if we can mat h it to the original building .

 

[JohnFParticipant @johnf59703]

Possibly a window sill but broken i.e. only the LH part — note the sloping top and dressed front. ????

John

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

Thanks John.  Yes the sloping part was something I noticed. Are the slots for metal staples to keep the blocks together?

This is an image of the original building. It was apparently a single very decent house when first built, with servants bells on the kitchen wall. But it was split into three separate cottages and then converted into a social club in the 1920s.

 

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

The far slot is for a cramp, the near one could be too, but could conceivably be a lewis hole, for lifting – the block broken in half at this point.

Half of the sill of one of the bay windows?

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

The far slot is for a cramp, the near one could be too, but could conceivably be a lewis hole, for lifting – the block broken in half at this point.

The cramp you mention, is this a metal staple to join two pieces,  I’m not very up on my masonry.

It would have been.a pretty substantial lump of stone when complete.

Such a shame the 60s saw something destruction of beautiful buildings.

 

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Yes exactly that, a staple glued in with molten lead.

A lewis is a method of lifting usually involving three keys or feathers linked by a shackle, placed in a dovetail-shaped hole – the outer two flare out at the bottom to form a dovetail shape, and are inserted first, followed by a central parallel-sided one to keep them from closing. Once all three are in they are linked by the shackle and lifted – a brilliantly simple idea going back millennia that’s never really been bettered (only made cheaper!).

[PlasmaParticipant @plasma]

The is fantastic information thank you!

I had seen the external caliper like lifting devices before but not the Lewis hole type.

I’ve often marvelled at how stone masons  manhandled huge pieces of stone into place before the advent of the kind of machinery in use today.

Coming ito Sheffield train station through a cutting there are huge blocks of sandstone that must have used Lewis hole lifting to place them in the wall.

Today it’s all pumped concrete, that will deteriorate much faster than the natural stone it replaces.

I can picture the builders of Belmont house using such lifters to place the heavy window sills in their seats. And I  can guess why they buried the huge pieces of stone rather than cart them away.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

The masons of old used manual winches and windlasses, blocks and tackle, levers…. and muscles.

Scaffolding was essentially long tree-trunks joined by lashings. The ancestor of the “putlog” cross-member we know as a tube with a flattened end to fit between courses, came from literally “put log” – a small stone left out of the wall to give a cavity for the timber cross-member to rest in. Some are still visible in the outer walls of Salisbury Cathedral where they evidently forgot to plug them! Can’t get the staff…

The enormous roof-trusses in such buildings were fabricated to jigs on the floor, marked up, dismantled and lifted piece-by-piece for assembly in place.

Henry VIII gave one of his wives a psaltery whose artwork includes a wonderful impression of building the Tower Of Babel. Artists of the time dressed Middle Eastern, Biblical characters in contemporary Western European clothes, and the illustration similarly shows what would have been Tudor building techniques. These include familiar marking-out and cutting tools still used by stone-masons, and a curiously double-drummed, manual winch for lifting blocks to the fixers. The latter might be an inaccurate representation of a two-fall rope and pulley – I don’t know if the differential windlass was in use that long ago.

Modern engineering technicians – the manufacturer’s fitters who assembled the giant engines as at Kew Bridge Pumping-Station – were often helped by teams of ex-seamen skilled in manipulating very heavy and awkward parts at great heights, by block and tackle, and muscle-power.

 

Builders today still use ropes and gin-blocks for raising small loads like fittings and buckets of mortar to the upper levels of scaffolding; but I have also seen a roofing-contractor using a portable conveyor like a straw-elevator to deliver tiles.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Possibly a cornice rather than a sill, but pretty certain it’s a bay window part.   Broken perhaps because it was thrown from a great height when the building was knocked down.

Hard to tell if this was a quality building or not.  Many older houses were jerry built.   There’s a picture of a notorious London slum in which the terraced houses look really good.  They weren’t:  the bricks were the cheapest possible Victorian rubbish, and deadly because they were porous, allowing rain in and soaking up sewage – bad drains!

On the other hand, plenty of fixable old houses were demolished by my father’s generation.  Mistakes were made!   My generation had to demolish lots of unsuitable tower blocks, many of which had won architectural awards!   Presented of course before anyone had lived in them.

Dave

 

 

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