Restoration of Lord Brassey Stamper Battery
The old stamper battery pre-restoration
In 2010 DOC launched a rescue operation to save the century-old Lord Brassey stamper battery which was lying on the verge of collapse in the hills not far from Reefton.
The restoration was the culmination of a thirty-year dream for Historic Programme Manager Jim Staton. Alongside him was Dave Hawes, the Operations Manger, a master of original timber construction methods with a CV in heritage restoration projects as long as your arm.
It was a rescue mission fraught with difficulty from the outset.
The first challenge lay in finding trees large enough for the 350mm x 350mm x 5.7m timber beams needed to replace the old wooden framework holding up the battery which had all but rotted away. Workers from Westimber, the only timber company able to supply such beam sizes, went out into the West Coast forest to search for suitable trees for the unusual brief.
Three members of the nineteen-strong restoration team
The next challenge was where to find a sawmill with saws large enough to cut this size of beam. Again Westimber came to the party with their West Coast mill meaning that the timber used was both locally grown and sawn.
Native timbers are out of bounds for restoration work today so NZ radiata pine was chosen to replace the original NZ beech. Here lay another challenge - how do you make pine last 100 years instead of 5? The timber was put through lengthy preserving and seasoning processes in Christchurch.
Next the team prefabricated the stamper framework in a Reefton workshop before disassembling it and flying it into the bush. The challenge was to assemble the large scale timber with the accuracy of a cabinet maker as per the original construction methods.
Restoration complete
Here Dave Hawes' mastery with the adze came to play. Passing on these scarce skills to a younger generation of tradesmen is a key aspect of such operations. Volunteering on the project was Graeme Richardson, a specialist in restoration of all things wooden and an industrial history aficionado. The team camped out in the bush for seven weeks reassembling the battery. The team reused all the old nuts and bolts of the original stamper battery - an amazing feat in itself.
Flying 20 tons of timber and hardware into the bush by helicopter and fitting the kingposts while the rotor blades sweep the tree line overhead takes military precision. Tom Williamson filming the operation described it as a "smoothly choreographed ballet between ground team and pilot".
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