Our Charles IV. - Charles Bridge I 30/4/2016

The construction of the bridge inspired a whole range of professions and crafts. The most important ones were stoneworkers and then also carpenters, who, among other things, produced wooden construction machines. A faithful model of the construction site can be seen, for example, in the Charles Bridge Museum. One of the most powerful construction machines, the medieval rammer, is again being built in the centre of the construction heritage in Plasech. After completion, it will be placed in front of the building of the National Technical Museum in Prague. Its builder, carpenter Petr Růžička, would also like to try it in practice when building a dry pit in the river. Here we are at the Charles Bridge pillar, on which the Old Town Bridge Tower stands. It is the original beach of the pillar, which can be identified precisely by the holes in the footrests and you can even see the original construction with the stoneworks. A serious interest in history can observe very noteworthy details. These are torsos of stoneworks. One is left here, we will find another one in a moment. These are signs that this block was originally built in the Middle Ages. The stoneworks functioned as if a worker signed his work today. It served to map the work and, of course, to pay for it. It is a very important data material and, of course, our contact with the medieval craftsman. On the actual model of the construction of the Charles Bridge, you can see the actual construction process. It starts with the melting of wood, i.e. on the top, you can see how the wood melted, how it was laid here on the shore and gradually moved to the Tisza factory. Further on, you can see the model of the quarry factory with the processing of stone from scrap. Next to it, you can see a part of the mill, and next to the water, you can see the lake. As we saw on the model, basically a demonstration of what the quarry factory looked like, here we see a quarry roof, which was made in the Tisza classic method, i.e. with an axe on a ribbon joint. Here we have two stonemasons, one master, one classic stonemason, who is currently making his own quarry. As you can see, he already has a defined path here, which can be made either with an axe tool or a manual tool. With this axe tool, we basically make such a path around the circle and we get such a ridge, which we then use with the pointed tool to get away from it. If such a square was defined, in order to be transported to the destination, it had to be laid on two wheels. To do this, a spruce was used, a so-called tripod, where the square was attached to a classic fence, which basically held the square. In a very simple way, we can lift the square. Here we see basically two types of spruce. One type is the so-called chisel spruce, which is an older type of spruce, which did not allow any rotational movement and was placed only with a wedge. The second type of spruce that we see here is the chisel spruce, which is placed both on the tower and in other places of its own construction. It allowed a rotation of 90 degrees, which was very unusual at the time. The credible theory is that a dimensional hole had to be built first, i.e. some construction made of wooden balls. Here on the model of the Charles Bridge we see several phases of the foundation of the pillar. The first is basically the first lifting of the so-called leading pillars. They were lifted with a lever, a classic, simple one from boats. The pillars that were lifted and formed the circumference of the future pillar were then cut off with so-called slings, and between the slings one pillar followed the other with a stable, large pillar. We are actually doing Tesar craft here, and the Tesar craft had several functions at the time. What we are doing here is the repair and production of construction machines. The most important machine is the construction pillar. It is a relatively large machine with a length of more than 10 meters. Here you can see a half-dismantled construction. It is a pillar, according to the Hussite anonymous. The principle of this pillar is very simple. You have two leading slings, between which a weight moves, which weighs between 200 and 400 kilograms. It is pulled to the height, the slings drop down and hit the pillar, blocking it. This is the engine of the machines. People call it a left-hand wheel, but it is not. We do not know how to translate it from German. The German terminology was a running wheel. You walk in it. The machine production used to be a part of the Tessar staff, because most of the components were made of wood. Here on the frame is the top representative of the Tessar craft. These are the widths. Here on the left is the width of the Middle Ages, or rather a replica of the Middle Ages. These are the axes, which you can find in the Prague Museum. Here we have a contemporary shape, which has not changed since the Baroque period. If you learn to do it well rhythmically and naturally, you do not do it by force, but by swing. The work is not so demanding. Of course, it is not that it is not demanding, but it is not as demanding as most people imagine. It is not tiring, and you can do it all day. Here in front of you is a half-tank, which is pointed into a small ring, which will serve as a ram, through which a rope will be led through the ring up, by which the body of the ram will be pulled up. It is quite complicated. The shape is not right-angled, in the sense that there are two converging surfaces against each other. I just want to document how easy it is to do it with an axe. So, we're done. Let's check it out. Basically right-angled. Here we have a graph of the wheel. It is made of six arms, and here are the tips, which will be clamped here, and the ammunition will come between them. Afterwards, after darkening the hole, water was drawn out. The water was drawn out by the so-called Tšber system. There we see the formation of the ring from the millwork, connected by the beams, and the gradual hollowing of the pillar. The pillar was hollowed out, the foundation was formed, and the stone ring was gradually hollowed out. In its time, Malta used several organic substances. First of all, gravel, which means that animals were added, and secondly, proteins such as cottage cheese, which was produced at Rudnický Most, or egg whites, which were produced at Karlovy Most. These proteins basically functioned as plasticizers, as additives that oxidized Malta, influencing its hardening, solidification and hardening.