Skin of block has great depth and texture
Towards the end of last year we were approached by Keith Horn Architecture and Tom Hoblyn the well respected garden designer to source the travertine required for their garden, sponsored by Arthritis Research UK, at the Chelsea Flower Show. The garden design was inspired by the gardens at Villa Lante and Villa d’Este near Tivoli (http://thomashoblyn.com/chelsea). The Classic Roman Travertine was naturally to be sourced from the quarries in Tivoli. The contractor to undertake the difficult task of actually turning the concept into reality was Dan Riddleston, Bowles & Wyer Contracts Limited (http://www.bowleswyer.co.uk/). Dan had not only to coordinate the various aspects of the project – for example the complicated and high quality steelwork for the water feature, planting the 9m rocket trees imported from Tuscany and handling the massive pieces of stone – but had to get it done in just over a week!! Incredible.
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Last week I took a trip to Verona with Canary Wharf Contractors and Commercial Stone Limited to view the production for six levels of Canary Wharf Tower taken by the Bank of New York. We were inspecting Verona Cream honed tiles and Virginia Mist polished vanity tops for the toilet pods. The Verona Cream limestone we we required needed to be clean with minimal fossil. This quality represents only around 10% of the production available from the quarry and to get to the selection means selection at every stage. We import the selected strips to Verona in 30mm thick and random lengths to then split, hone, calibrate and cut to the 305x305x10mm size specified.
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This week I received images of the CCP reception we completed at the end of 2011. It was a great project to be involved in this project where the Canadian client wanted to use a Canadian stone. The most striking and well known Eramosa was the obvious choice.
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I returned to Venice to inspect the finished production for Bank of China last week. The blocks had yielded some cracking material and once dry looked as per our approved mock up seen in November with TP Bennett & Overbury.
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This week I visited a factory in Barcelona from which we buy Flint limestone. This order was for the project Coleman Street.
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Recently we received an inquiry via our website requesting help to find a limestone being offered by the high street retailer Fired Earth to hopefully offer a saving.
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This week we visited a Pietra Serena Factory near Firenzuola, Italy. It is a busy factory with many contracts but one particular regular client requires exceptional selection and colour control to ensure all tiles are the same!!
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This week we visited the Pietra Serena Quarry near Firenzuola, Italy. We luckily witnessed a block being blasted to move it away from quarry face, see video below. Also video of us entering the quarry to set the scene. Great quarry with very definitive strata and bedding plains.
Explosion moving a reasonabley sized block away from the face.
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Here are the formal results for the Shell Gris. A durable stone and good for 500,000,000 visitor foot traffickings during its design life. Not bad at all.
shellgrisabrasion44795g2.rep
This week I had to confirm the suitability of our Shell Gris for a very large commercial project I am currently working on. The building in The City would be the workplace for over 6000 people and with the design life of 50 years. This requirement would mean the stone needs to withstand 150,000,000 visitors during its life (6000 x 2 (to and from work) x 250 (working days in the year x 50 (design life). If you add the fact that everyone might go out for lunch and that then doubles to 300,000,000!! But that would be taking it too far detail wise!
We use the abrasion test BS EN 14157 2004 to establish the suitability of any given stone. I popped down to the lab (Sandberg Consultancy – Clapham www.sandberg.co.uk ) to watch these taking place being the nerd I am. The stone samples are first dried (really dried) and then using a marker the consultant marks the surface before fixing in place. A spinning wheel is pressed against the stone surface at a given pressure and then an abrasive poured into a funel from above falls between the two surfaces. This continues for 1 minute exactly then the stone is removed and the width of abrasion created is measured. The measurment recorded (in millimetres) and this is repeated in this case for six specimens (the recommended number of samples). Interestingly we used 3no polished and 3no honed and it made very little difference, just 0.5mm. A difference all the same.
The result recorded for our Shell Gris was 19.50. This is an excellent result and means the stone can resist 500,000,000 foot traffickings during its life so in fact we can allow the people using the building to nip out for lunch and half of them to pop out for a fag break too.
