« A Brief History of Art part I | Main | Which way’s up? »
September 14, 2008
Contemplating stollage
Sitting here wondering how to support the semi-elliptic office desk I’m building, I contemplate stollage. Great thing stollage, the stuff of massive woodworkings.
Stollage is a word you won’t find around a lot. In fact when coupled with the word “parrot” it’s a googlewhack – that is: it gets only one hit [or at least it did at 15:35 today].
It’s basically an intense collection of numerous jointed timbers that supports a superstructure, like a stage. Not to be confused with rafters, which are numerous jointed timbers that support a roof.
It can also be a pile or stack of unjointed timbers supporting an oil tank or water butt or such. Though this is usally called cribbing, but it isn’t such an unusual word [combined with “parrot” it gets 7270 hits on Google] and should not be confused with cribbage which is a different game altogether.
It’s thought that the ancients used stollage [or cribbing, if you prefer] when erecting their huge monoliths.
They would roll the big stone onto one timber, then by lots of them climbing on the end they would tilt the stone up a bit. Then they would put another timber, slightly bigger than the first, under the stone. Everyone rushed to the other end, see-saw style, and the stone would tilt up again, a bit steeper this time, while bigger timbers were stacked under it. Thus rocking the stone back and forth it’s possible to raise it high off the ground. [Look here for more on this.]
Mind you, when it comes to the desk, I think stollage might be rather over egging the pudding, for one thing they’d struggle getting their legs under it.
Posted by john at September 14, 2008 05:42 PM