They're using ordinary power tools, such as bandsaws and sanders. There's some hand tool work on the connections between beams. It looks like cabinetmaking carpentry on a larger scale, with lots of chiseled joints.[1]
The real hand work is on artistic stonework. That really is being done by hand. Omni CNC's proposals to make replacement parts with their stone-cutting computer controlled milling machines were turned down.[2]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/travel/notre-dame-restoratio...
[2] https://www.omni-cnc.com/how-cnc-stone-cutting-machine-help-...
I came here to share that the importance of using contemporaneous materials, if not methods, was highlighted for me when I worked on Bath cathedral and saw how the victorian 'improvements' of using iron rather than wood to fix the stonework caused much damage a century later; iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking.
Then I see linked in that article that Notre Dame was a very early example of using iron staples! I can only think that they were used away from water, unlike Bath, where the repairs were on the window fixings.
They also rely on medieval era trees to reconstruct it, as the more than 1000 oak trees painstakingly sought through entire France had to be more than 1 m wide. Okay not medieval - they are only about 200 years old. Could have made a nice title though.
Whatever happened to the many hundreds of millions French billionaires said they would donate for it? I know a couple have coughed up, and most of the companies who said they would have but I don't all who promised to do so have.
There is a great episode of NOVA about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/
I've seen some videos on TikTok by stonemasons who are re-building the decorative shapes in chunks of marble; it's very cool to watch and see them doing it.
It's probably not even remotely economic or "productive", but sometimes that's OK.
> it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true
I could maybe understand artistically if the end result looks different. But ethically? It's a building, ethics don't apply to it.
There are many solutions in old hand-tool woodworking that were elegant back then, and are still more relevant today than spinning a tool at 20k RPM.
Example: when removing waste with a chisel for joinery, going cross-grain allows popping large chunks with ease, rather than route them to dust. And it's a lot of fun!
Power tools do have a use for repeatability and mass-production, which may be useful in the Notre Dame build, but I find the carpenters' approach more honorable.
Interesting. The architects and workers reconstructing Warsaw also had to rely on drawings, paintings etc., most of them made by Canaletto.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/09/21/bellotto-the-18th-cen...
they should have built the roof with steel & glass so it can't burn!
The rebuilding is apparently going well, but this is hiding the fact that nobody seems to be doing any inquiry about why the fire wasn't stopped in time.
As far as we know, the fire was an accident (not foul play) -- but an extremely preventable one. There were works in progress on the roof of the cathedral, so people were coming and going, some of them possibly smoking, electrical devices were being used, etc.
And to monitor all this activity, there was only one guy, who had started on the job a couple of weeks earlier, who had received little to no training, and who didn't even know where the alarm was.
The point was to "save on costs", that is, in order to save maybe 1,300 euros / month over three months, the people in charge caused 1 billion euros of damage and lost irreparable historical artefacts.
There is a whole administrative department in France, whose sole responsibility is to make sure this kind of catastrophe never happens. At the very least, people should have been fired, from the site manager to the culture minister. Yet nobody's being investigated, let alone prosecuted or punished. Incredible.