• According and finishing

    Restoration, St Stephen's Church

    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.

    cantilever south portal Steenskerk, before the approval work

    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.

    accordion work and mortar repairs
    Stide is working on the final mortar repairs and according work

    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.

  • Placing the side crockets

    Latest projects, Restoration, St Stephen's Church
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    The new lace flowers are very dense the new consoles, but that was just the same in the old situation. Far left you can see a small piece of new trefoils

    new crockets placed on south portal Stevens church in Nijmegen

    To the first post about this project

    The 100th post on this blog has been reached, and today we had (my colleague Stide and I) had another milestone as well: the mounting work on St. Stephen's Church in Nijmegen is nearly done. Today the mounting of the side crockets got almost finished.

    I was very pleased that after all our work of measuring, drawing templates, cutting out the old pieces and carving the new blocks everything fits just fine.

    new kanthogels hang on the outside of the nose cone. South Portal, St. Stephen's Church in Nijmegen

    We have first cut the (wettened) blocks all exactly to size and then started mounting them from top to bottom. That way the underlying work stays clean and the new joints will not wash out when we use water. The side crockets are suspended on two glued pieces of wire end in each block, and of course on the grout. Soon, of course, the whole arch will be filled in. The string is to be able to draw out the wire end, should something untoward happen.

    The curve of the pointed arch runs beautifully all the way through. If we wouldn't have found the right center of the pointed arch (the ‘porring point’) then would either have ended up as a series of flat surfaces or a set of waves, rather a beautiful tight curve.

    pointed arch with three new fit, consoles kantbloemen

    Stide carved these side crockets in tuff stone, to a reconstruction that I made based on the remnants of the old side crockets. Side crockets are crockets on its side, so reclining crockets, and crockets are the well-known flower motifs from the Gothic, especially found on pinnacles for decoration. Four crockets forming a cross-shape make a finial.

    The dark line is formed by the inside of the (wettened) blocks with side crockets. The arch's curve runs just right. If everything is dried up and pointed, you'll no longer notice that new pieces have been inserted.

    The old situation illustrates well how the weathered tuff lace flowers were for dismantling.
    The before situation shows well how weathered the Tuff side crockets were before disassembly.

    Tomorrow morning we will place the last two blocks and then we'll fill in, that is to say, we'll fill up the open joints all the way until they're full, and then according. That is further explained in message 101!

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