London church's brass feature

28th January 2016

We were contracted to replicate a Lion and Unicorn brass floor feature in the entrance lobby of the St John’s Ambulance headquarters for the floor of the Church a few hundred metres away.

St John’s has been in existence for over 1000 years being part of the Crusaders and a Hospital in Jerusalem was formed by the brother Knights of St John’s who wore the distinctive eight pointed star on their tunics and is still today the emblem for St John’s Ambulance. An industrial photographer in London was contracted to take still pictures from above the brasses in the floor and from these digital photographs we produced CNC code for the water jet and the engravers scaling up by about 2.5 times from the original size. Two blank rectangles were cut on the water jet and sent to Fine Cut Graphic Imaging Ltd in Lancing (one of our customers) to engrave the features within the Lion and Unicorn and then to use black filler in the engraved features. The two parts were then linished at Cirrus Laser to remove the excess filler. Parts were then clamped on the waterjet and referenced from the orthogonal sides to cut the profile for the Lion and Unicorn. Both parts were then sent by our customer to Stone Mason’s in Portugal to fit the brasses to local stone which had the correct colour and texture to replicate the original floor brasses. The new brasses and Portugese stone surrounds were then fitted to the Church floor in Clerkenwell.