My name's Tim Whiting, I'm a millwright
and I've been working on mills for eight years
and I've been working as a general wood worker for over 20 years now,
and my team is now restoring Saxtead Green Post Mill.
I went to college and trained as a cabinet maker in 1998,
and my first workshop when I went self-employed as a cabinet maker
was in the grounds of Friston Windmill and from then on it's been windmills, full stop.
So there's been a post mill in Saxtead Green since 1287,
and the current building that's there now has been there since 1796.
It was taken to the site by two hundred oxen.
Saxtead Green served as a working corn mill up until 1947, just after the war effort,
and it's now under the care of English Heritage since 1984.
I was drawn into being a millwright simply by the techniques of the woodworking
that ancient millwrights and even modern millwrights use,
The techniques have changed very very little,
we do have power tools now obviously, but it just draws you in.
You're copying things that were made a hundred, two hundred years ago,
so with Saxtead Green the sails we're now putting on are a real close copy of
the original working sails that the mill would have had in its last working days.
By their own design windmills are always put in a most prominent part of the village
so that they can catch the wind as much as possible,
and because of this they're always in the thick of the weather.
So when they get to a certain age things just need to be replaced.
All coming off everywhere...
It's quite an intense project to try and get as much done as possible.
Redesigning a new set of sails for a post mill, often you'll find
there's sails on a mill but they might not be quite right.
That's gonna need scraping back. There's been rubbing.
So what we do is, we go back to historical photographs of the mill
and sometimes you can find remnants of sails kicking around on the site
and you can then copy the true measurements to how the sails were
originally fifty or even a hundred years ago.
and then when we've got these measurements,
we'll then completely design a brand new set of sails matching the original one.
Normally we aim for when the mill last worked as a commercial building,
and then from that we're ordering the timber which you can imagine is massive.
We've got new stocks that are over 50 feet long
and we've got whips which form part of the sail frames.
All of these components then have to be completely hand shaped
and morticed to meet your new design.
There's a lot of shaping, there's a lot of chamfers
there's all sorts of different compound angles
and basically, generally the way we do it would be quite traditional.
The actual things that everyone's doing, the joints, all the different types of
way of putting things together is all the same as it always would have been.
We still use winches, we're still using our wire ropes,
it's very very traditional.
When you're building sails for a windmill,
it's not just a straight trellis like you would buy from a shop
and this is designed with the twist to make sure that it's an even pressure
when the wind hits the sails as opposed to putting a strong force where the sail would be weak,
so every single angle on the sail is slightly different.
All the joints are then painted up with traditional paint,
so it'd be a lead-based paint in all the joints,
and then we use a linseed oil based paint to get the nice white finish for everyone
to look at when they see a mill with fresh sails on.
Although we make them as light as possible,
the actual sail frames are still going to be reasonably heavy for a timber building.
Now, a lot of people think oak is a general timber for stocks and all the big components.
Oak is too heavy and also it's quite brittle,
whereas the type of timbers we use being a Siberian larch or a Douglas fir,
or traditionally it would have been a pitch pine though they're very strong and very flexible.
We're using a 60 tonne crane that will stand at Saxtead Green.
It can be quite tricky when you're fitting sails onto a mill.
There's a lot of work that you can't reach from out of the storm hatch,
which is a small hatch on the front of the mill.
You can't reach everywhere from there so we tend to use rope access work
or we use the cherry picker, so depending on what we're doing
there's a lot of working at height.
Suffolk has some of the most amazing examples of windmills in the country.
It's quite an honour to be able to work on Saxtead Green because it's had some
amazing millwrights over the years and it's quite a privilege for us to be
following in their footsteps.