Conserving our Victorian ironwork
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Inside the vast workshop at Shepley Engineers, Sheffield, much of the Palm Houses ironwork – from floor grilles to spiral staircases, from the Tropical ‘crown’ to the iconic arched windows – is being restored or replaced.
Watch the short film below to learn more about the fascinating process of blasting, repairing and painting, as we renovate these wonderful buildings.
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Restoring the Palm Houses
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Video Transcript Time Description [Steve King, Project Engineer] We are in Shepley's Workshop in Sheffield. and I'm a Project Engineer. We have been commissioned by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and we are removing anything that we can off the building and run it through the restoration process. On this project, it's been the stipulation of the client that we try and repair as many components as we can, keeping the original fabric. Sometimes it's not possible, we do have to replace them, but on a lot of components, we've managed to save doing repairs, overplating, all these kind of methods to keep the original fabric. Once the components have been delivered and unloaded to my workshop, and I'll tag 'em. The reason we do all this is because every component on this building has a location so when it goes back, it'll go back in its same location. So once we've tagged components, we'll blast all the old paint and rust, and years of grime off them, to bring them back to the bare metal. Once we've done that, we can see what's underneath, and that's where we make this assessment on what we need to do to repair this component. This is where we decide and the client decides with us what we repair, what we replace. If it be a crack and it's agreed that we will braise, then we prepare the cracks within, for instance, the floor grills and we braize them. Brazing is a type of welding. We'll let 'em cool, we'll grind them, and we'll test them. So at once the mechanical guys have done their works on it, we'll send it to our quality control. We will ensure all repairs have been done correctly and to standard. After QC, we take 'em to paint, and part of that is to do the second blast. The second blast is to clean it back to nice clean material and give the profile for the paint to be applied to, so the paint will stick. With some of these components, the shapes can be awkward to paint, so we have to strike all the awkward corners and the various sharp edges, where the paint gun won't reach, and then it goes through the finishing process. Every coat has got to be the thickness as required by the manufacturer. Once the painting process has been complete, we will do our paint records, we will pack it, we will do any trial fitting of components and make sure nothing's missed or mixed up and we will deliver it back to site.
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