Remember I Said They Were Regilding Moroni?

Well I was wrong, they were actually replacing the statue with a completely new Moroni! This is the new Moroni in his shipping crate.

Another view of the new Moroni in his shipping crate. Note that there is no visible trumpet. It is in the long thin box below his head at the top of the crate.

They had to lift the head end partly out of the crate to attach the trumpet. Note Laurie supporting Moroni's arm. The man in the blue shirt is Fransisco, the person in charge of the part of the church physical facilities that includes the temple. Laurie does a lot of work with him.

Here they have attached the trumpet. They glued it into his mouth with silicone and there is a large bolt that attaches it to his hand. The man with the partial black glove, Franklyn Carillo, is the artisan who is repairing the gold leaf where the bolt attaches the hand to the trumpet. He does painting and gold leaf work in the temple.

These are some shreds of gold leaf left on the little paper after Bishop Carillo finished making his repairs to the gold leaf.

This is the brush, with flakes of gold still on the bristles, that he used to fix up the gold leaf.

This is Bishop Carillo again. This time he is up in a cage at the end of one of the big cranes. He is taking out the lightening rod that sticks a little ways out of Moroni's head and replacing it with a large screw eye to attach to the hook on the other crane to remove the statue. They say the statue has been hit several times by lightening so I guess it is a good thing to have a lightening rod all the way down through the statue.

All is ready to take down the existing statue of Moroni. It took a long time to get to this point. I had probably been here watching for about 2 hours.

They have him pulled out and he is on his way down. Note the pink plastic shields attached to the outside of the cage so as not to damage the statue should it bump into it. Note the long shaft that had been down inside of the spire holding the statue in place.

This is the shaft end of the old Moroni after he was on the ground. The long copper cable that extends through the shaft and down into the temple is the lightening rod.

I guess he was really quite weathered and tarnished. Over the time this statue has been atop the temple, Bishop Carillo has gone up in that cage several times and regilded parts of him. But this time they decided he needed to be replaced. I thought they would probably send the old statue back to SLC for regilding and then use it on another temple. But Francisco says they are going to store it here for a while then send it to El Salvador where the temple is bigger and they have more storage space. Then there they may regild it and use it again somewhere else.

The new statue is attached to the crane and is starting his journey upward.

Now he is getting close. Note the long copper cable that will be threaded down into the sleeve and end up grounded somewhere inside the temple.

Here Bishop Carillo and another worker, who by the way has on a harness attached to the cage to keep him from falling, have threaded through the copper cable and are trying to set the shaft into the sleeve. But for some reason, they are having a hard time getting it in. The shaft appeared to be identical to the old one they took out. But at this point, I had been there about 3 hours watching so I decided to go home.

Laurie and Francisco watching and trying to figure out what is going on, or not going on. The other man has a phone with which he is communicating with the men in the cage.

Here is the new Moroni atop the temple. But this is the next day. They discovered that the old shaft had in it a groove that they had not noticed and in the sleeve is a pyramid like projection over which the groove is supposed to fit. But since there wasn't any groove, the projection was keeping the shaft from going in.

So they had to take him back down and carve a groove into the shaft so that it would fit over the projection.

But they eventually got it all done and the new Moroni is in place and definitely looks shinier and newer than the old one. It took a lot of people and equipment a long time to get the job done!