Post by woodsmith on Jun 7th, 2009, 3:14pm
I thought I'd share what I have been doing for the last couple of weeks with those that are interested in such things.
I've spent the last couple of weeks on my knees in church!
Over the years the pews have been moved around, repaired and some have been previously shortened. Of course they have always picked a point in the pew where there was already a joint and so they have ended up completely out of line.
I took this job on without going to look at it, a big mistake as they were worse than I had been told; at least I was on day rate :D
I had been told there were three long pews but as you can see they are almost all out of line. In the end I decided to line them up with the two that ran up to the columns, I didn't think it a good idea to start the job by knocking a few columns down.
Not all the ends were the same and some had been up against a wall as they were rotted at the bottom. I had to go to a local farm where they had some old pews piled up in the corner of a barn and remove some of the better ends to replace the rotten ones. We didn't have enough to change them all so we had to make them all match as best we could.
No machinery! I had to cut all the joints by hand, hard going on the knees and so many rusted in screws
The finished job. We had a few people coming round when we started saying it was a waste of time but they started singing from a different hymn sheet in the end :D
