Yesterday, I met our glazing surveyor on site to carry out a final check on some dry lined openings. In a couple of weeks, these openings will be filled with some rather expensive and good looking glazed fire screens. With tight deadlines to meet, there is no room for error and we needed to check that these openings had been created to the correct and agreed sizes.
Not one of the 10 openings were plumb and square, in fact a couple of the nibs were actually twisted. Fortunately, because of our diligence and attention to detail, we were able to avert an installation nightmare.
We stood there and laughed at the irony; a couple of years ago, the same surveyor and I met on site to survey 6 brick arches that were to be infilled with glass. These arches had been stood for over 100 years in what is now a listed building used for a college. We laughed because we recalled standing and staring at each other (armed with ply wood and lasers for templating), thinking that we were going to be in for a long day. How wrong could we have been, built long before the invention of the laser, each and every one of those arches were identical in both measurement and radius.
Ok, so the building probably took years as opposed to months to build, but even in the fast – paced industry that we now work in, you would hope that with all the equipment available to use, we, the modern man, could actually build a square opening. Apparently not!