Page 17 Advertisement 1

New Zealand Tablet, 12 September 1912, Page 17

All last week in Princes street, Dunedin, crowds watched the hoisting into position of a huge steel girder designed to support the steel-framed frontage of the seven-storeyed building which Messrs. Lawrence and Sons are erecting to the order of The Dresden Piano Co., Ltd. This girder, which was constructed by Messrs. A. and T. Burt, Ltd., weighs 10 tons, is 3 feet deep, feet wide, and measures 40 feet in length. It is claimed to be the largest ever put into a Dunedin building. Drawn to the job by a team of eight horses, the giant beam was laboriously shifted on to a; staging of railway sleepers, ,and then very slowly but surely jacked up until; it finally reached a height of 16 feet above the pavement level. Critics among the onlookers were not wanting, and grave doubts were freely expressed as. to the possibility of successfully shifting the enormous mass horizontally from its wooden staging on to the two steel stanchions fronting the walls of the structure. The problem, however, much to the astonishment of the lay minds, was got over, by . the employment of a double action jack which first lifted and then carried its load forward. It all looked : simple enough when the job was finished, but architects, contractors, and workmen doubtless sent up a sigh of relief when the unwieldy mass of metal was safely in position'. By the use of this girder all the usual frontal pillars are dispensed with and an expanse of nearly 40 feet of plate glass is obtained. The building, than which there will be nothing finer among the piano warehouses in Australasia, is being constructed of ferro-concrete .and brick with a skeleton steel front, which is to be faced with "dull glazed tiles of delicate yellow relieved with black, the colors adopted thirty years ago by the Dresden Piano Co. The tile work is being turned out by the famous English firm of Maw and Co., Ltd.