Jason Hoffman is in Norway helping out on a dry stone bridge building project with Haakon Aase an accomplished stone mason from Litlebergen Hordaland.
Haakon's bridge has a whopping nineteen and a half foot span and is being constructed with local gneiss material.
Haakon and a local farmer had been planning the bridge for several years. They have been raising funds and sought advice from the roads department whose engineers produced a lovely but useless report. So Haakon and some keen helpers went ahead and just built the arch.
Jason has been FB friends with Haakon for a couple of years and this winter asked about coming to Norway to help build the bridge. Steven Rowe and Jason flew out last Sunday for an intensive week of dry stone bridging.
Jason says he and Steven are part of the phase two squad. The phase 1 squad built the voussoirs. Phase 2 is building the side walls with some pretty massive gneiss stones.
Haakon and a local farmer had been planning the bridge for several years. They have been raising funds and sought advice from the roads department whose engineers produced a lovely but useless report. So Haakon and some keen helpers went ahead and just built the arch.
Jason has been FB friends with Haakon for a couple of years and this winter asked about coming to Norway to help build the bridge. Steven Rowe and Jason flew out last Sunday for an intensive week of dry stone bridging.
Jason says he and Steven are part of the phase two squad. The phase 1 squad built the voussoirs. Phase 2 is building the side walls with some pretty massive gneiss stones.
Haken Says that “the people involved have jumped into their tasks with great enthusiasm. Pinning and tickling in ‘mellomroma' between ‘kvelvsteinane’ . The build is going quite fast and it’s hard to pull people away from work for supper.
It looks like pretty rough going doing the foundation digging
The segmented arch form is positioned on steel I beams until the voussoirs and most of the entrados stones are in place
Safe working areas are needed either side to work off of.
All the 2x4s over the form will be pulled out before the supporting curved centering.
Notice the clever metal stone scoops.
Nice work everyone ! Thanks Jason for the update.
