Bulmer Brick Cutting is proud to have been involved in the rebuilding of the grade 1-listed west elevation of St Pancras station, having supplied 45 replica gothic arches in 4 different styles to date.
The order arrived as a spreadsheet, asking for total quantity, by size/shape etcetera. The key problem was how to get over 20,000 pieces to site, on a ‘just in time’ basis, in the correct order to lay, and without risk of damage to the soft hand-cut profiles. The problem was compounded by the complexity of the arches: apart from the stone, which came from elsewhere, they consisted of 75 different shapes and sizes of brick, which had to be laid in exactly the right order.
Before hand cutting, each fully washed rubbing block has to be ‘bedded and squared’. Traditionally this was done on a flat York stone slab. Today we use a large industrial circular sander. The squared block is then cut to gauge on a circular bench saw.
At this point the piece is ready to be hand cut to one of the profiles for the arch. The templates around which the craftsman cuts need to be identical to all the templates for that profile. For this reason it was decided to use laser-cut plywood for the hundreds of pairs of templates required. With the problem of accuracy and the consistency of the templates resolved, it meant we had to hand cut all 8000 plus profiles! A traditional bow saw is used with a thin twisted wire blade. Each twist and turn in the shape needs to be carefully cut to avoid undercutting the finished piece. The templates were reversed every twenty-five cuts and changed for new, every fifty cuts. On completion, the piece was cut to taper on a circular saw and dipped in water to check for flaws. With an average cost of over £20, we individually hand-wrapped them all for protection, too.
A major challenge was to work out how to supply the arches in a manner that would enable bricklayers on-site to work logically through the arch building process with confidence.
As MD Colin Pinnegar explains, “In the end, we devised a ‘building by numbers’ system, providing diagrams of each arch, with the correct number shown on each brick to be laid; then we designed and produced a self-stacking tray, with minimum footprint for storage, onto which we loaded each brick to be laid – individually numbered in chalk – in the order in which they were to be laid, with a blue card between bricks, to mark each new course. The larger arches comprised two pallets (left & right hand side), each containing 13 trays of sixteen hand or machine-cut soft red rubbers.
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