Rogues Gallery

This is a very old chimneystack on a lovely old listed building. The bricks are quite soft and the chimney has obviously been repaired and re-pointed many times over the years. What a pity then that some buffoon of an aerial rigger has come along with his big drill and caused the damage shown in this sequence of photographs.

The first shot shows the wall bracket as I found it. Why a wall bracket was used on such an obviously unsuitable chimney I don’t know. (It would have been far better if two chimney lashing kits had been fitted, one above the other. With less-than-perfect masonry it is often better to use two lashing kits and brackets rather than one, because then it isn’t necessary to tighten the lashing wires so much.) The bracket has six fixing holes, but only the top two actually had any purchase, and both were into the same brick. An attempt was made to get two more fixings on the right-hand side of the bracket, but both of these were into the very edges of bricks so they failed immediately. Our hero seems to have given up at that point, since he made no attempt to use the lower left fixing holes. The brick carrying both upper fixings has broken and would soon have pulled out, causing the whole installation (two quite large aerials on a 6 foot mast) to fall.

The second shot shows the wall after the bracket was removed, and the last shot shows the bracket and plastic plugs.

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