The first bent goes into position in our new timber frame pavilion

We did it… our new timber frame pavilion has been successfully raised. All worries were put to rest once we had our rigging ready and the first bent went up as smooth as butter. Cutting a frame with a whole bunch of hand tools is fun, but seeing your work raise high into the sky is hard to beat on the excitement scale. Yow!

Bents are laid out and ready for lift-off

Prepping for the Timber Frame Pavilion Raising

Getting ready for the frame raising, despite how small the structure is, still demands a lot of attention. Assembly requires a good bit of careful attention to the joints to make sure everything fits up — the last thing you want is a tenon that’s too fat while things are hanging in the air. Here’s what our finished bents looked like on the ground, just prior to raising. Everything’s been squared away and pegged. You know you’ve hit the home stretch when you can finally pound some pegs into the joints. It’s another lovely feeling in the timber framing experience.

Jacob happily drives some of the first pegs into the frame

For a personal touch… don’t forget to grab a sharpie marker and write a message to the future, or sign your name and year on the pegs that get driven into the joints. Friends and helpers will get a kick out of this, too. It’s crazy to imagine when someone will ever see that writing… could it be 100 years in the future, 200, or more…?

Raising Bents

We employed a very useful winch during our small timber frame raising (just like this one here). I gotta say, I was duly impressed by the simplicity of this tool. Our friend Tim owns the winch, and it simply slides into the hitch of the truck and is powered by the vehicle itself. The winch has a whopping 8000 lb. capacity, plenty for our small frame, and when combined with a single redirect pulley high up on a tree, the winch (and truck) could be far out of the way of the frame raising. Very simple stuff. Gotta love that.

The first bent is almost vertical!

We employed our human helpers to help with the initial lift, to avoid the whole bent from being pulled forward by the winch alone. Once the bents were airborne, the winch did the rest of the work as two people watched and maneuvered the post bottoms onto the timberlinx collars. (I’ll have to write another post about our tie down method using the timberlinx… what a neat piece of hardware.)

The second bent gets a lift

The whole operation was very smooth, I’m happy to report. We successfully avoided any scary moments. The second and third bents were even more exciting, as they glided into position and met the girt tenons beautifully.

Lifting a girt into position, and bracing it with a simple 2×4 prop

To raise the girts into position, we had enough hands on deck to lift each girt individually and slide it into each respective post. A simple prop stick, a 2×4 with a little 2×4 shoulder piece at the right height made holding the far end of the girt up quick and simple. (See 2×4 in the image above and below to understand what I mean.)

First of two girts nearly ready, and one more bent left to raise

The final bent needed a bit of coaxing, so the fan favorite commander made an appearance to help snug things together. That reminds me… we need a medium sized commander for tasks like this… this sucker weighs quite a bit, and is better like a golf club, not an overhead mallet.

Using a commander to snug the joints together

Our raising crew was very happy to be part of the action, and needless to say, we were pleased with the fluidity of the process, too. Everything came together exactly as it was supposed to, and there were no injuries or mishaps to report. Gotta love that.

Our raising crew, very pleased with the results of the morning

All that’s left is some oiling of the timbers and a roof…

All that’s left for us now is to finish the timber frame pavilion with some oil, and get the roof on…