Friday, 17 August 2012

Mr & Mrs Taylor, The Old Stables, Stow on the Wold


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. 

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