"Construction and fabrication of quoins was essentially same as for inner doorways" writes Mr Adcock, " with one big wrinkle… the ‘tie stones’ in the gap between the seat quoins spanned the whole gap. This was another mad idea brought about by my concern that 2 shorter white granite runners would not leave much of a gap and they’d need to be the same height if it wasn’t going to get very messy, so why not run them all the way? "
" Spanning was a mad solution which had knock on, problematic effects. As with the shorter runners the curve was marked by eye/approximated and over that length there was plenty of room for error on my part. Looking back I suppose I could have sat down and worked out the supposed radius for the given height and worked out the offset for that length of arc etc. Sometimes life is too short and even I resort to guesswork. What’s more I don’t think it would have worked very well. I think perfectly executed stones of that size on a generally imperfect interior would probably have looked completely out of place, and thus in a way would have been completely, or at best far too, imperfect."
"The voussoirs here were quite long - going deep into the back of the seat opening the second voussoir on the left seat was a bit strange, we used a stone with the natural shape we needed, which didn’t really need angling. I think we hoped we could carry on this way, on the more rustic inside. However it didn’t work out like that, and whilst we didn’t cut uniform perfect extrados, that particular one really stands out for its 'imperfection'. "
"Having mentioned the problem with cutting keystones here, the imperfections of the voussoirs initially made the idea of fashioning the keystones somewhat daunting, The solution was to have the keystone in two parts, placing and refashioning the front section was easy enough, dropping the back section in and then removing it for a bit more shaping would be another matter… The solution was to cut a shallow groove in it and for David Claman to lower it in (and pull it out) with a loop of wire."
"There was something wrong with a number of the voussoirs in terms of curved face and batter. Something went awry. This whole section caused problems for subsequent building as there was often a stone in the way of getting the profile just right and subsequent stones had to be offset from the profile… I was forever fiddling with flat spots and far less than perfect stones that were annoying me"
"I notice a wire from the centre pole in this photo… which reminds me that that was how I attempted to maintain some sort of curve for the inside voussoirs, using it as a rough guide (given that the pole was not necessarily vertical or in the centre (lol) or the wire was perfectly horizontal etc. Basically it was more a case of checking the offsets on both sides were about the same for each pair of voussoirs rather than trying to make sure they were in exactly the right spot."
