According and finishing

The project at the South Portal of St. Stephen's Church is now completed. Today Stide and I first went on with according. When all the pieces are placed in mortar, there will always be a spot somewhere where the connection is not quite optimal. According means making the pieces fit by carving away bits of stone in appropriate places.

New side crockets, consoles and trefoils for St. Stephen's Church in Nijmegen-situation before finishing. Top left: a view of the bottom of the original console that has been preserved.

Luckily this time there was not a lot of carving and fitting work to do to; we just checked the arch again and put some finishing touches.

In addition, we still had to add restoration mortar to the connection of the new work on the old portal on a number of points. That was foreseen as well: unavoidably a number of seams were made where they first were not , because we only replaced the most weathered portions of the pointed arches.

The tail of the side crockets should eventually connect nicely. That connection will be carved on site. For this, Stide left some excess material, as margin.

There are a few blocks where the seams ran right through the tails of the side crockets. In that case, Stide carved the tails a bit too heavy on purpose beforehand, so that the whole can be carved to fit on site. If he would have carved it right to size, there wouldn't have been any room left to adjust something on the spot. In the end you have to deal with an old church: nothing is exact to size, exactly square or true to level. You will have to carve it 'in the works’ to get it to fit.

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To the first post about this project.