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EAL Unit: QSWC1/01: Starting Work in Construction
Published in Peter Roberts, Electrical Installation Work, 2017
An important consideration of most craft based occupations is that they can be labour intensive. Being a brickie or roofer, for instance, can literally be back breaking work but equally very rewarding as you witness the building being physically assembled. Another potentially arduous job is that of a stonemason, who is involved in repairing stone on old buildings, or working with stone blocks on modern new build houses. A stonemason also erects stone walls on public roads, either by using mortar or through dry stone walling techniques, in which walls are assembled by selecting and meshing various types and size of stones. Lastly, some stonemasons are commissioned to create sculptures and various types of memorials.
Numerical Assessment of Cracks on a Freestanding Masonry Minaret
Published in International Journal of Architectural Heritage, 2021
İlker Kazaz, Polat Gülkan, Emriye Kazaz
Stone masonry is the craft of building a structure from dressed natural rock units. Being a unique example of its structural type, the sequence of construction stages of four-legged minaret requires a description. Although the embedment depth is not known exactly, the pillars supporting the minaret are erected on the basalt bedrock that lies beneath the 1.75 ~ 3.25 m thick silt-gravel-clay mixture at the surface. The layer thickness was obtained from two boreholes drilled for an earlier geotechnical site investigation. We assume that the pillar tips are in contact with the bedrock because otherwise significant differential settlement among the columns would have arisen (Figure 4(a)). No such tilting exists on the columns. Column capitals are placed on top of the pillars (Figure 4(b)). In between the pillars and capital, there existed folded zinc plates preventing the crushing and grinding between the stone surfaces and acting as vertical suspension. Today only small chunks of these zinc plates remain. Then comes the most critical part of the minaret, which is the base composed of stone lintels, slabs and wooden beams. Four basalt lintels are laid on the capitals each spanning a clear distance of 0.85 m between the capitals (Figure 4(c–d)). Two of them have a depth of 0.52 m (north and east) and the other two are 0.36 m thick. In the inner region, four wooden beams with cross-sectional dimensions of 0.15 × 0.2 m are placed to support the base slab stones together with the main lintels (Figure 4(c–d)). It is thought that the inside wooden beams increase the flexibility of slab systems against impact forces acting in the vertical direction, thereby acting as interface shock absorbers. These wooden beams may be replaced in time. Four equal sizes and approximately 0.16 m thick slab stones are laid on the wooden beams (Figure 4(e)). These flat stones (Figure 4(f)) level the height difference between the stone lintels. At this stage, a plane surface is at hand on which the minaret body can be constructed.