Stable Walls - Watermill Blog
7th & 9th April 2009

Both days this week saw work being done to the stable walls.

On Tuesday, John and Bob did the final repairs to the interior of the gable end wall and the work moved outside and upwards on Thursday as Dave and John used a borrowed scaffold tower to fix helibars across cracks in the brickwork.

Helibars are made from stainless steel and have a helical spine formed along the length. They are very effective at stabilising cracks in brickwork and we have used them in a few location on the mill and the stable.

The process is to rake out a deep slot in the mortar across the crack to be stabilised. The helibar is then  inserted into the slot and the repair pointed up as normal. Once the mortar has set the sides of the crack are bound together and we have stable walls.

Tuesday also saw work continue on the downstream tun although Jim  and Richard were limited by a lack of new timber. This has now been delivered so work should move forward next  week. Colin and Headley spent the day cleaning up the bevel gear from the overhead drive. 

Colin and Max tackled some heavy lifting on Thursday. We had got advice from our consulting mill expert about lifting a burr stone, who had responded with "It should be alright if the outer bands are sound".

A chain hoist was slung from the beams above the stones and the runner stone was raised a little at a time with wooden blocks being inserted to prevent stone from rubbing on stone.

Once the stone was high enough it was swung onto  rollers and moved clear of the bedstone. At first sight the centre bearing is in better condition than its upstream companion but we will check carefully before we put everything back together.

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