January on site began with a very chilly start. The cold weather from Siberia meant snow landed across the site and turned the restoration into a winter wonderland. Nice for pictures but not so good for putting up brickwork. The cold temperatures mean that the lime mortar will not set off.Needless to say the restoration team worked round this and set off on other tasks on the site.
Stove House 5
excavations
Much of January was spent excavating the base of Stove House
5. A new concrete slab was required in order to support the restored building.
This meant digging a large area 20m x 20m that was the footprint of the
building.
Good news for archaeologists as it allowed us to excavate a
large area of the earlier Alliance Salt Works http://thelionsaltworks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-lion-salt-works-history-of-site.html and conduct an
excavation. This was ably undertaken by Oxford Archaeology North under the supervision
of Graham Mottershead.
One of the big tasks was to repair the walls between the pan
and stove houses. The problem with the building was that the walls were built
on steel girders. This allowed a series of flues (tunnels) to pass from the
stoves under the pan into the drying rooms in the stove houses (See how to
build a Pan House http://thelionsaltworks.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/how-tobuild-pan-house.html and Stove House http://thelionsaltworks.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/how-tobuild-stove-house.html for details).
Unfortunately the effect of the salt on the metal meant it
corroded and the walls collapsed!!
In order to rebuild the walls and support the interior of
the stove houses a large concrete slab was inserted. This retained the interior
of the stove house and also allowed the walls to be supported.
The new wall could then be built on top.
No comments:
Post a Comment