Getting timber layout complete and ready for cutting

We packed in a lot of action during our four days of the 2014 Timber Frame Workshop last week. This was our first official course in our new home location in the Berea, Kentucky area, and I couldn’t be more pleased! The mountains, trees (and accompanying abundant shade), fresh spring water, and wildlife made an excellent backdrop to learning about timber frame layout, cutting, and assembly. It was great to meet new folks and reconnect with some ‘alumni’ from previous classes, too.

We were very fortunate to obtain our timber very (very) locally for this class. A kind fellow less than 1/4 mile down the road felled the white oak trees and sawed up the wood for all of the pieces for our outdoor kitchen pavilion frame. His bandsaw did clean work, but as our students learned… despite how square something appears to be, a sawn green timber is rarely actually square.

Laying out with a carpenter’s square… not quite as simple as it may first appear!

Square Rule Layout

And so we spent our first day talking about methods for dealing with less than perfect timber, and implementing square rule layout techniques to impose a perfect square where none may exist. We talked about the “perfect timber within every timber” to deal with imperfections in the wood. This is often one of the more confusing aspects of timber framing, especially for folks with limited experience. There is so much visualization to be learned when dealing with layout, and there’s some amount of head scratching during the process as folks try to see ahead and understand the ultimate goal.

Everyone had some opportunity to work with a framing square to get a feel for how to accurately and effectively use the tool. We probably could have spent four days using a square alone, but then we wouldn’t have been able to do much else, of course. That’s just to say there’s a lot more to this simple tool than meets the eye, and just learning how to hold a square takes significant practice.

Of course, there is much to remember when doing square rule, such as remembering where your arris is. (The arris being the intersection of two reference planes, of course.) We stressed how important good layout techniques are, having clean lines, and checking your work frequently. Good layout is the foundation for a successful frame.

April’s delicious meals kept us going and were always greatly anticipated each day

Despite the heat, folks did an admirable job, and we all got prepared to think about sawing, chiseling, and boring holes for the next two days. Thank goodness for our “wedding tent” and the shade it provided — of course the workshop week was the hottest week of the year so far. And major kudos to April and her amazing cooking during the class — we all enjoyed the nourishing food she whipped up daily. I think it was a big highlight for some students….