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  • My name's Tim Whiting, I'm a millwright

  • and I've been working on mills for eight years

  • and I've been working as a general wood worker for over 20 years now,

  • and my team is now restoring Saxtead Green Post Mill.

  • I went to college and trained as a cabinet maker in 1998,

  • and my first workshop when I went self-employed as a cabinet maker

  • was in the grounds of Friston Windmill and from then on it's been windmills, full stop.

  • So there's been a post mill in Saxtead Green since 1287,

  • and the current building that's there now has been there since 1796.

  • It was taken to the site by two hundred oxen.

  • Saxtead Green served as a working corn mill up until 1947, just after the war effort,

  • and it's now under the care of English Heritage since 1984.

  • I was drawn into being a millwright simply by the techniques of the woodworking

  • that ancient millwrights and even modern millwrights use,

  • The techniques have changed very very little,

  • we do have power tools now obviously, but it just draws you in.

  • You're copying things that were made a hundred, two hundred years ago,

  • so with Saxtead Green the sails we're now putting on are a real close copy of

  • the original working sails that the mill would have had in its last working days.

  • By their own design windmills are always put in a most prominent part of the village

  • so that they can catch the wind as much as possible,

  • and because of this they're always in the thick of the weather.

  • So when they get to a certain age things just need to be replaced.

  • All coming off everywhere...

  • It's quite an intense project to try and get as much done as possible.

  • Redesigning a new set of sails for a post mill, often you'll find

  • there's sails on a mill but they might not be quite right.

  • That's gonna need scraping back. There's been rubbing.

  • So what we do is, we go back to historical photographs of the mill

  • and sometimes you can find remnants of sails kicking around on the site

  • and you can then copy the true measurements to how the sails were

  • originally fifty or even a hundred years ago.

  • and then when we've got these measurements,

  • we'll then completely design a brand new set of sails matching the original one.

  • Normally we aim for when the mill last worked as a commercial building,

  • and then from that we're ordering the timber which you can imagine is massive.

  • We've got new stocks that are over 50 feet long

  • and we've got whips which form part of the sail frames.

  • All of these components then have to be completely hand shaped

  • and morticed to meet your new design.

  • There's a lot of shaping, there's a lot of chamfers

  • there's all sorts of different compound angles

  • and basically, generally the way we do it would be quite traditional.

  • The actual things that everyone's doing, the joints, all the different types of

  • way of putting things together is all the same as it always would have been.

  • We still use winches, we're still using our wire ropes,

  • it's very very traditional.

  • When you're building sails for a windmill,

  • it's not just a straight trellis like you would buy from a shop

  • and this is designed with the twist to make sure that it's an even pressure

  • when the wind hits the sails as opposed to putting a strong force where the sail would be weak,

  • so every single angle on the sail is slightly different.

  • All the joints are then painted up with traditional paint,

  • so it'd be a lead-based paint in all the joints,

  • and then we use a linseed oil based paint to get the nice white finish for everyone

  • to look at when they see a mill with fresh sails on.

  • Although we make them as light as possible,

  • the actual sail frames are still going to be reasonably heavy for a timber building.

  • Now, a lot of people think oak is a general timber for stocks and all the big components.

  • Oak is too heavy and also it's quite brittle,

  • whereas the type of timbers we use being a Siberian larch or a Douglas fir,

  • or traditionally it would have been a pitch pine though they're very strong and very flexible.

  • We're using a 60 tonne crane that will stand at Saxtead Green.

  • It can be quite tricky when you're fitting sails onto a mill.

  • There's a lot of work that you can't reach from out of the storm hatch,

  • which is a small hatch on the front of the mill.

  • You can't reach everywhere from there so we tend to use rope access work

  • or we use the cherry picker, so depending on what we're doing

  • there's a lot of working at height.

  • Suffolk has some of the most amazing examples of windmills in the country.

  • It's quite an honour to be able to work on Saxtead Green because it's had some

  • amazing millwrights over the years and it's quite a privilege for us to be

  • following in their footsteps.

My name's Tim Whiting, I'm a millwright

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