St. Henry’s Catholic Church / Nashville, TN
The stained glass windows at St. Henry’s Catholic Church in Nashville in 1953. For a short period of time, they were considered the largest stained glass single-figured windows in the country.
The original installation was typical stone set with one rabbit deeper for diagonal insert of the stained glass panels. Horizontal tee bars were cold-rolled uncoated steel, inserted into the notched limestone jambs with no fasteners. Supplementary mill finished aluminum vertical tee bars were attached at each end to the steel horizontal bars.
Basic first year chemistry teaches us that dissimilar metals cause galvanic corrosion. This was the case with the 38 foot tall windows at St. Henry’s. Every intersection of steel and aluminum had corroded resulting in total structural failure.
We removed all the stained glass and created a totally new framing system using a unitized anodized finish aluminum frame with zinc chromated painted steel inserts and stainless steel fasteners.
