Work continues on my two current joinery projects, and more posts will be forthcoming shortly.
Today I wanted to share with readers a couple of interesting French carpentry videos I came across recently.
This first is a pleasant audio visual experience featuring a CAD depiction of a clocher, or spire, which had suffered distortion as a result of settling at a foundation point. Some of these spires – a minority – were actually made purposely with twist, while others twisted by accident. Carpentry lesson: by fussy about the foundation details! These distorted spires look so wonderful!
Here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOiiT8ueaOg
The next one is a bit longer and narrated in French, and concerns the layout of a delightful form of under-eave cantilevering that the French employed in 19th century carpentry. This type of layout is covered in the Mazerolle book, but in only in relation to balconies – here the layout is for the roof support for a lucarne, or dormer. An interesting video to watch, and I link it as it shows quite well what can be accomplished by the study of layout in carpentry, and gives a view to some aspects of the French method, featuring full-scale layout on the lofting floor. The video begins with a visual survey at a past compagnon masterpiece with a double geometrical staircase inside another form of spire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TmYdAUX6pA
Happy viewing!
Your post brought back memories (I was there in the seventies) about the chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Marché in Jodoigne that was twisted by design.
The french wikipedia article lists many twisted towers and also refers to weight problems.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clocher_tors (maybe more readable with google translate)
That was fascinating. It's just amazing what people can do with SketchUp. Thanks for the link.
@Damien,
thanks for the link! I had no idea there were so many twisted spires out there, and that there were examples from outside of France. I hope to write more on these twisted spires in the future – and at least explore the geometry issues with a scale model.
@Charlie (Woodjoint),
glad you enjoyed the links, though I don't believe that first one employed SketchUp to produce those animated effects, but some other 3D CAD software, along with various specialized sound effect generation programmes. I've watched that half a dozen times now!
~Chris