Hi all, our blog post for
this week in an extract from an article that was published in in the SelfBuild
& Design Magazine Feb 2007. Have a read of it below.
“
When we first cleared the
site, we came across the iron rims and axles from an ancient cart, and we’d had the idea of turning them
into a sculpture for the courtyard. The man with apparently the right
credentials is in a nearby village. “Is
that Mick Keepence?” “I’m afraid so’ comes the response with a twinkle in his
voice.
Mick is a tonic. ‘Ahh,
tyres,’ he says patting the giant rusty iron rims. He tells me how the old
wheelwrights used to forge-weld them,
then get them red hot so they’d clamp onto a wooden spoke-frame as they cooled.
First, Mick shot blasts
our iron to clean it up. Then he tacks the rims and axles together, and
patiently he breaks them apart again
when I want to do something different. His son helps him heave the result down from the work-bench, and
his wife and daughter – half a dozen beagle puppies at their heels – join in
the debate on what colour the
sculpture should be powder coated. Must be the selfbuilder’s heaven, this!
Mr Taylor has since then
wrote a book on his wonderful self build experience and we are proud to be
mentioned in this.
