Masonry Magazine September 2005 Page. 40
MASONRY AROUND THE NATION
began the process during pre-construction- nearly a full year in advance of when the finished pieces would be needed. In addition, extracting the rock in Brunswick, getting the finished shop drawings, fabricating the new pieces at a granite fabricator in Marlboro, Mass., and shipping them back to the Maine job site was a complex process.
Masons are the Stars of the Show
NOWHERE are the artisanship and talents of Consigli masons more apparent than in the meticulous repairs made on some of the chapel's decorative comer stones. At least half of these pieces required epoxy-pin and patching repairs, but in the aim for authenticity, visible repair cracks would have been unacceptable.
Since the patching material only came in uniform colors, the engineer completed a petrographic analysis of the existing stone to determine its primary component (e.g., Hornblende or Magnetite), and then mixed ground-up particles of the appropriate element into the patching material to achieve a color-correct area that left no visible line on the stone.
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Valuable Learning for Future Projects
THE ENTIRE PROJECT team's insistence on meticulous labeling and documentation of each and every piece even before it was removed - along with continuous updating of CAD drawings that helped the masons to know exactly which stone went where, were the key to managing 4,700 historically significant pieces of granite and ensuring that everything got put back where it belonged.
Detailed Mock-up
Another critical contributor to the success of the project was the involvement of the masons early on to analyze the existing structure, brainstorm the best ways for removal and restoration of the stones, and to build detailed mock-ups to test real-world tolerances and determine possible points of failure. Shown above is a mason working on a mock-up that includes a window, an arch top and structural back-up (flashing to be installed) - a detailed replication of the complexities of the actual job that helped to satisfy the various members of the project team that all potential points of failure had been anticipated and planned for.
The Consigli project managers also note that on a job such as this, it's impossible to overestimate the lead times necessary to extract stone from a quarry and fabricate the pieces. The schedule must have generous tolerances for unexpected delays-tolerances for which the project team was grateful when they ultimately had to extract twice as much stone from the quarry as originally planned because so much of it had unacceptable imperfections.
The level of collaboration between the college's facilities management staff, the structural engineers, the fabricators, the masons and Consigli's own management team was "textbook." This, more than any other single factor, was the key contributor to the successful restoration of this historically significant structure.