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.
