Its been a nice bank holiday and its been a little casting and a little architectural sort of weekend, along with some clearing up inbetween.
It started several weeks ago on one of our sites which had the old Victorian fencing and these were in a terrible state, and I received a text from one of our site crews working on the site doing a little prep work who asked if they could cut the tops off this old fencing and keep them as they were all animals and not the usual finials. Obviously they were being scrapped, so said yes.
Over the weeks he has cleaned them up and made moulds for casting new ones and over the holiday he bought his moulds over and aluminium was smashed up and melted, and new ones were cast, he now has a quantity of them, or he has as many as we could cast as we ran out of scrap aluminium.
While smelting a mate came over from his tyre and exhaust fitting centre and bought me my usual array of buckets of used wheel balancing weights, these are white metal and as they are melted for pouring into ingots the scrap spring clips are removed. They are then poured into moulds for the ingots.
Prior to this weekend another friend called in a favour and asked me if I could set his new replica fencing as he has a new property and wants to retain his original looking frontage with its original looking architecture, and has had new fencing panels made from steel to replicate his old ones. He has had his new walls and pillars built from reclaimed bricks and has set his new keystones on top of the walls, but left the cap stones off his pillars.
On the side of his new fencing you have locating tabs which insert into the mortar joints and give support to the top of the fencing panels, and the bottoms have holes drilled into the keystones onto which the bottom of the metal fencing sit, and traditionally they have lead poured into them to align and set the bottom of the fence. With a set of ingots and the gas fired melting pot in hand it was time to install them and the keystones were marked and drilled 30mm and the mortar joints were raked out and each individual panes was wriggled into position. Once the top was set and located a pot of molten white metal was taken and poured into the middle hole and allowed to set and the middle of the fencing was set into position, the outer mounting posts were manipulated into position and filled with molten white metal and allowed to set, then the rest were filled to hold the mounting posts solidly into position. The top lugs were pointed into position and the whole metal panel was solidly set into position.
Hopefully this may be useful for anyone else looking to do some historical restoration work, or merely replacing old metal fencing.
It started several weeks ago on one of our sites which had the old Victorian fencing and these were in a terrible state, and I received a text from one of our site crews working on the site doing a little prep work who asked if they could cut the tops off this old fencing and keep them as they were all animals and not the usual finials. Obviously they were being scrapped, so said yes.
Over the weeks he has cleaned them up and made moulds for casting new ones and over the holiday he bought his moulds over and aluminium was smashed up and melted, and new ones were cast, he now has a quantity of them, or he has as many as we could cast as we ran out of scrap aluminium.
While smelting a mate came over from his tyre and exhaust fitting centre and bought me my usual array of buckets of used wheel balancing weights, these are white metal and as they are melted for pouring into ingots the scrap spring clips are removed. They are then poured into moulds for the ingots.
Prior to this weekend another friend called in a favour and asked me if I could set his new replica fencing as he has a new property and wants to retain his original looking frontage with its original looking architecture, and has had new fencing panels made from steel to replicate his old ones. He has had his new walls and pillars built from reclaimed bricks and has set his new keystones on top of the walls, but left the cap stones off his pillars.
On the side of his new fencing you have locating tabs which insert into the mortar joints and give support to the top of the fencing panels, and the bottoms have holes drilled into the keystones onto which the bottom of the metal fencing sit, and traditionally they have lead poured into them to align and set the bottom of the fence. With a set of ingots and the gas fired melting pot in hand it was time to install them and the keystones were marked and drilled 30mm and the mortar joints were raked out and each individual panes was wriggled into position. Once the top was set and located a pot of molten white metal was taken and poured into the middle hole and allowed to set and the middle of the fencing was set into position, the outer mounting posts were manipulated into position and filled with molten white metal and allowed to set, then the rest were filled to hold the mounting posts solidly into position. The top lugs were pointed into position and the whole metal panel was solidly set into position.
Hopefully this may be useful for anyone else looking to do some historical restoration work, or merely replacing old metal fencing.
