We just wrapped up our 7 day Timber Frame Workshop and I’m finally catching my breath. Whew. Timber framing has a steep learning curve so it’s not the kind of thing you can easily jump into, willy-nilly. It takes some warming up and getting used to lots of new terms, tools, methodologies, etc.
Timber framing is, first and foremost, an exercise in visualization. Looking at plans and applying layout to a timber, imagining a timber oriented in the building — these are all skills that take some time to hone. It’s a totally different way to approach building the bones of a house because everything is laid out and cut in advance of the pieces being assembled. So it’s immensely helpful to be able to see things in your mind, before they exist in front of you. Essential, even.
Square Rule Layout: An Exercise in Visualization
And so our first 2-3 days of the workshop consisted entirely of doing square rule layout, transferring measurements from the plans onto the timbers themselves, drawing tenons and mortises, and dealing with wood that was not all perfectly sawn.
One of the challenges we met was how to impose a square onto a timber without any square corners. Ideally your reference corner is square, but some of the pieces that came off the sawmill were severely out of square. That meant using a level and chalkline to create our own reference lines. This adds quite a bit of time to the layout process, but it’s a good lesson that even imperfect material can be used with some special consideration.
The beauty of using square rule layout is that you can have variations in your material and not have to take every one of these inconsistencies into account. Though those “parallelogram” timbers do require some individual attention. Green wood from a local sawmill can be very affordable, whereas milling and drying perfect dimension timbers requires many more resources. Therefore, square rule layout is a great system for using locally sawn green timbers.
One thing I love about timber framing is how many different skills it encompasses. Cutting the joints is just one step along the way. The mental gymnastics of visualizing finished timbers, imagining joinery, and basically working in three dimensions in your mind is a huge component of the overall process. Fun stuff.