Where have I been today?

[biffvernon]

 

[Moneypit]

Oh dear, poor Biff, it must be really worrying when you can't even remember where you've been earlier in the day.

Seriously though, I don't think I can help, but it looks ecclesiastical. I can count four poles so could it possibly be Warsaw?

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Hmmmm. Lincolnshire? Possibly in the county town thereof, at its principle place of worship? or perhaps Louth? or Grantham? or one of the myriad other huge yellowbelly churches?

 

[Lime]

Taking pictures just before the oversize uPVC is put in?

 

[biffvernon]

Just two (scaffolding) poles, a master mason and a fellow student. Certainly ecclesiastical and as oversizes as they come. It's the top of the world's largest medieval window. A long climb.

 

[Flyfisher]

A long climb.

Wouldn't they let you use the lift then?

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Aha, the outside shot gives it away - York

 

[biffvernon]

Yes, courtesy of York Uni Centre for Conservation and their MA course in Stained Glass Conservation, who were putting on a Masterclass about the Great East Window.

Here we are pondering conservation strategies for one of the Medieval glass panels.

 

[Penners]

Would you like to see what you get if you Google "minster window york"?

http://www.minsterwindows.com/windows/

 

[biffvernon]

I'm sure due consideration of uPVC was given but in the end they settled for a bespoke formulation of bronze for the frames, as seen in the foreground.

 

[Flyfisher]

Can you get DG stained glass, or is it best practice to use secondary DG in order to meet the latest building regs?

 

[biffvernon]

Traditional leaded glazing wouldn't be gas-tight enough to make a sealed unit. The best thing for a modern domestic situation would be to have a double glazed unit on the outside and then fix the stained glass on the indoors side with the space between ventilated with indoors air.

With historic stained glass, it becomes important to protect it from the weather but thermal insulation may be less important. Best practice seems to be to have external secondary glazing that is weather tight and the stained glass panel fixed with an air vent at top and bottom allowing indoors air to circulate either side of the glass, keeping it dry and relatively warm. You lose the external appearance, but a compromise is to make the external glazing with leaded plain quarries, diamond or oblong, or, much more expensively, leaded with a pattern that follows the main leads of the actual stained glass panel. Such a leaded protective glazing has a limited life before maintenance is required and must be regarded as sacrificial.

 

[Penners]

Biff - all this talk of stained glass moved me to have another look at the eponymous page on your website. Did you know that the link to it from your home page doesn't seem to be working?

 

[biffvernon]

Yes, largely due to the completely evil people at Orange who managed to delete that section of my website at the same time as I lost the backup on a poorly hard-drive while Google hadn't archived it. If I don't find a copy somewhere soon I shall have to do it again

 

[Penners]

Uh-oh. One of those "Oh bother!" (or words to that effect) moments.

 

[Flyfisher]

Biff, there are internet archiving sites out there somewhere. They might have a copy of your old pages.
Google 'wayback machine' for details.

 

[MdB]

They don't of the page of interest - I looked earlier.

 

[Flyfisher]

Ah, pity. There's always the possibility of recovering the data from the faulty hard drive, at a cost of course. Depends on the amount of effort required to re-write the original web content (and what else was lost).

 

[Penners]

Recuva is a free downloadable utility that will recover a high proportion of deleted or corrupt files.

It all depends on how much activity took place on the hard disk after the loss of the data. If the deleted sectors were intact, and a lot of activity went on, then there's a risk that some or all of the sectors could have been rewritten to.

But it might be worth trying Recuva.

 

[biffvernon]

Yes, but much more intersting is the issue of how do you replace missing medieval glass from the Great East Window. Do you remove the 'innapropriate' 19th century insertions an replace with something likely to be closer to the original, or should the stained glass panels be just cleaned, made structurally sound, and replaced with all their history of past poor conservation practice?