Welcome to Builder Bill's Wrinkles.

1. What has been happening on the site?
2. Old tools in a street market. Cologne, Germany
3. Timber Buildings, Certainly the largest that I have ever seen.
4. A new respect for Victorian wrought iron work.
5. Recycling, a trendy buzz word but it is as old as the hills.
6. How do you smooth a wood carving when there is no sandpaper.
7. A real helm roof.
8. Two iconic buildings

Quick questions:-

1. What is a cruck?
2. What is Dendrochronology?
3. Do you know the origin of the term "knocking off" or to "knock off", meaning to finish work for the day.

Answers at the bottom.

What has been happening on the site?

Well for 8 weeks I have been away on holiday, seeing a little bit of Europe and a lot of London. We were based at our son's place in Bromley Kent.

Since I have been back, the last four weeks I have got stuck into the glossary section again, and also I have started putting a lot of my reader questions on this page so that others may benefit. Or at least it may stop some of the repeat questions that I get. I hope to implement a little form that will allow users to ask a question and at the same time upload a photo or sketch, as this is by far the best way to get a handle on a problem. As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Right at present I have over 1600 images on the site.

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Old tools in a street market. Cologne, Germany

If you have peeked into my drawing pages you might have seen my conte crayon sketch copied from one of works of that superb artist Kathe Kollwitz. Well, when I was in Europe recently We went to Cologne to visit the Kathe Kollwitz museum.

While waiting for it to open one Saturday morning, we had a stroll around a small market and imagine my surprise when I came across a couple of stalls selling old tools.

The guy was busy talking to someone, but he said it was OK to take some photographs. Which of course I did. Most of the things were fairly obvious what they were but I must admit that some of them had me stumped.

The moulding planes and the wooden try plane would suit many a collector I am sure, but I haven't a clue as to the three pointed thing in the foreground, and there are a couple of hammer like things with a sort of boomerang type head on them.

In this next shot a couple of draw knives are sat casually on top of a curved grooving or rebate plane, which is interesting enough. There is a small dovetail saw hiding away at the back and what is that curious hammer like thing behind it? It looks like it could be some sort of prying tool.

I kick myself looking at my photos now and I wonder why I just didn't slip the guy some Euros so that he would let me handle them and take separate photos of each one.

Another thing I noticed was that nearly all the metal work was in excellent clean shiny condition with no rust and no oil on the surfaces. It makes me wonder if he had some sort of electrolytic bath for removing rust.

I have no idea what sort of prices he was charging for any of it.

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Timber Buildings, Certainly the largest that I have ever seen.

Above is a shot of the Number 3 Slip Cover at the historic Royal Dockyard at Chatham, on the river Medway in Kent, UK.

It does not look particularly impressive in this long shot, but think about it this way, the fully rigged ship in the foreground could have been built an rigged inside the building and then floated out into the river.

The Swedish were the first to have the idea of building their warships in roofed slips, or dry docks. They built bigger ones than this, but unfortunately they have not survived.

So what is the big deal about building ships under cover? We don't do it today with the current crop of steel ships.

The answer is fairly simple, as any amateur wooden boatbuilder will tell you. The timbers rot from the inside due to the action of fresh water. Fresh water lying in odd nooks and crannies in the bilge and elsewhere had been the bane of boatbuilder's for centuries. Sea water does not do it, just fresh rainwater.

This building at Chatham dates from 1810 and it is of all timber construction, except for the wrought iron bolts and straps holding the framing members together.

Originally the roof sheeting was tarred paper, cheap and lightweight. No other roofing material at the time was lighter, copper would have come close but would have been too expensive. Lead and clay tiles would have been far too heavy.

In 1904 the slip was filled in and not long after that a mezzanine floor was fitted. This mezzanine was used to store ship,s boats and the like, and because of this floor there is no real way to get a clear photograph of the interior of this historic building.

Mind you, the upper floor does let us get up close to the roof. As you can see the whole span and wall sections consists of king post roof truss arrangements sharing common members.

This large timber building sits next to one that is the same size and had the same function. It was built only 15 years later but the change in construction was almost incredible. The era of cast iron and wrought iron had arrived.

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A new respect for Victorian wrought iron work.

The roof of Liverpool Street railway station in London, UK.

I wonder if any of the Aussies reading this remember a guy called Jack Mundey and the green bans? In the early 1970's he was the leader of the BLF, (Builder's Labourer's Federation) and he lead that trade union and a growing band of green activists that said "NO" to the "develop at all costs" gang.

The values of inner city land were skyrocketing and developers were ripping down priceless historic buildings and replacing them concrete and glass abortions.

The Central Meat Market, Smithfield, London, UK.

The two photographs above are of buildings in London that have been brilliantly renovated and they are both doing the same job that they were designed for in the early part of the 19Th century.

I took a few shots around the railway station, before I was reprimanded by a member of staff. No photography allowed, security and all that!

At Smithfield Meat Market I got an entirely opposite reception, a young electrical tradesman saw my interest and told me to "hang on" while he ducked inside an office and came out with a glossy brochure for me that detailed the renovation work and all the new facilities inside the old building that has made it, and here I quote, "A European and possibly a world's best practice meat handling facility".

The young sparky was justifiably proud of the place that he worked.

I can't help thinking that but for Jack Mundey and his mates it might have been a very different story.

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Recycling, a trendy buzz word but it is as old as the hills.

On the right is a photograph of a bit of old timber that is not doing it's original job any more. It is sat there now as a rafter in a roof space, but the large mortise in it shows that at some earlier stage it had seen service as something else.

What that something else was is lost in the mists of time, but what I do know is that when I took the photo it was acting as a lower rafter in the roof of the nave of Salisbury Cathedral in the UK and it had been doing that job for many hundreds of years. The main body of the cathedral was finished before 1300 a.d.

When you think of the enormous amount of work involved in producing straight lengths of timber in those days it is little wonder that when older buildings were pulled down then the timber would have been carefully salvaged for reuse.

I had the great good fortune to revisit Salisbury on my recent trip to the UK and enjoyed it immensely.
I couldn't help but look in awe at an original of the Magna Carta, 1215ad. One of only two in existence; this document is the thin end of the wedge that is known as democracy. (Sorry about that, once a builder, always a builder.)

The chapter house that contains the Magna Carta is itself an architectural masterpiece but in spite of this and much more, the highlight for me was a tour of the roof and the tower. Of looking up into the hollow stone spire that is the tallest in Europe. Of seeing the incredible complexity of the structure and the obvious skill and inventiveness of those medieval builders.

I have heaps of photographs and I will have to do some detailed pages on it and also of some of the other old timber buildings that I visited.

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How do you smooth a wood carving when there is no sandpaper.

The photo above is a detail from a limewood carving by Grinling Gibbons. The Stoning of Saint Stephen. 1680-1710. V and A museum, London.

The carved panel is about 4ft by 3ft and say 10" deep. The detail in the photo is the main part of the action and maybe 12" wide. Gibbons is known for his carvings in Saint Paul's Cathedral and other public buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

I spent a fair amount of time tracking down some of this guy's work. Mostly it is very hard to find out who actually did the work because after he got famous he had a school of craftsmen working for him.

So how did he and others like him achieve the fine polished appearance of works like this? I saw one source that said it was done by using a certain type of weed or plant that had rough leaves. The name of the specific plant was a closely guarded secret.

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A real helm roof.

In a previous newsletter I asked the question "What is a helm roof" and then gave a small line drawing as the answer. Well here we have a photograph of a real one, that sits atop a tower in the 13Th century Romanesque church of Saint Aposteln in Cologne, Germany.

I like the detailing here. The small parapets to the gables to direct rainwater into the gargoyles (water spout) that throws the water well clear of the masonry. The lead covered corbelled out strips that do the same thing for the wall faces of the tower.

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Two iconic buildings

I had a bit of a stab at some of the abortions that were built in the late seventies and eighties, and to a certain extent there are still a lot of nondescript building being built today that should have never got approval, but "the Gherkin" is not one of them.

This building was a leader in style and design when it was the first new high rise in a fairly untouched section of London.

The Gherkin sits on the site of the old London Baltic Exchange, a grade 1 listed building, which was built in 1901. So it never would have been built, at least not in it's current position, but for the fact that the old building was severely damaged by a Provisional IRA truck bomb in 1992.

Designed by Sir Norman Foster and completed in 2003, it now stands among other huge buildings, not one of which is is worthy of a second glance. Whether from up close like the photo above, or miles away down the river at Greenwich the eye is always drawn to the Gherkin. It's real name is 30 St. Mary Axe.

Above is a photo that I shot from the South bank of the Thames looking at that other iconic London building, St. Paul's Cathedral. I could waffle on about the work of that great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, and the surviving Wren buildings that I visited, but in this case the photo is more about the Millennium Bridge in the foreground.

Once again a product of the fertile mind of Norman Foster it is a magnet for tourists and locals alike. I did a few good walks along the Thames path, and even though I had walked over this footbridge a few times it was always herd to resist the urge to duck across to the other side.

The bridge shot into immediate fame a day or so after it's opening in June 2000. There are various videos about of what happened, with the bridge swaying so much that it had to be closed. Two years later after dampers were fitted the bridge was reopened and is now a great asset to that section of the city.

At my back when taking the photo is the Tate Modern art gallery which is housed in the old Bankside Power Station. I could definitely waffle on about that, but I'll leave it for another day.

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Answers to Quick questions:-

What is a cruck? What is Dendrochronology? Click here to find out in one of my new Glossary pages.

"Knocking off" or to "knock off", meaning to finish work for the day. This phrase goes back to the time when the machines in mills and factories where all run by a central source of power. The photo above was taken in a small factory that was originally run by a water wheel, but was converted to steam a hundred or so years ago. (The steam engine is still running(.

The steam engine drove a series of shafts and pullies that in turn drove the machines by flat leather belts.

At finishing time A whistle would blow, (steam of course) as a signal for everyone to knock the drive belts off their machines to stop them.

This was a fairly simple and safe operation done by levering the belt off the pulley with a lump of wood.

I use the word "safe" reservedly here, and in the context of the times, because we are talking about unguarded belts and pulleys.

Still, from my own experience it was fairly safe. What was different altogether was the practice of taking a belt that had been knocked off and putting it back onto a pulley without first shutting down the main drive. That was scary! It required a certain level of skill and a huge amount of stupidity, yet guys used to do it just to save a bit of inconvenience.

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