Back in time with #RBOSS

The Queen’s Pier in Ramsey in the Isle of Man is in dire need of restoration. First opened in 1886, 104 years later it finally closed and has been in a state of decay and decline ever since. But things are looking up – the Queen’s Pier Restoration Fund are slowly but surely making progress on bringing this impressive landmark back into use.

It’s painstaking, expensive work and you can help them out with some funding by clicking the link above if you so desire. And – if you’re local and feel the need – you can even volunteer to help with the ongoing work.

“Oh ya, and I also helped rebuild a 2,244ft long Victorian pier.”

Stick that on your CV and smoke it.

But there are some locals who are trying to assist in ways that you and I could only ever dream of: taking historic engineering from way back in time and dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st Century: rejuvenating the superstructure of the Queen’s Pier via the means of #RBOSS.

This incredible image appeared on Facebook yesterday.

Amazing. You can literally see some of the stabilising cross-bars between the Victorian cast iron piles (over 40 feet in height (with 18 foot piles) on a 6° pitch) glowing brightly as they are heated to around 1200°C in order to remove impurities which might weaken the overall structure.

You can usually only do this is a specialised foundry. For the metal on the pier, this heating was last done in Stockton-upon-Tees in the 1880s: the RBOSS technology to repair these important stabilising braces on-site simply wasn’t available until now yesterday morning.

This revolutionary technique is not without risk, however. Primary dangers in flinging the saturation slider all the way to the right, saving the image and then doing it again include literally burning right through the iron which is holding the pier up (you can see this occurring on one piece of cross member) and also turning the corona of the sun a weird grey-green colour.

But in the hands of an RBOSS expert (as we undoubtedly are in this case), this method is a quick and easy way of mending a Manx landmark. It’s surely only a matter of time until Peel Castle gets an evening* makeover. Sure – that’s made of stone, which will only melt at 4000°C, but with the right software and a desire to make everything oranger than it actually is, anything is possible.

In the meantime, we’ll keep enjoying the seemingly almost unbelievable explosive colour of every daybreak in Ramsey via Facebook, while the Queen’s Pier gets rebuilt by whatever means are available.

* West coast, see?