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!
A bit over a week ago, we raised our mighty giant of a bent for the kitchen. It’s the bent we’ve been working on for weeks and weeks – an assembly of three posts, and a beam with a scarf joint. The beam in question is a gigantic, curving sycamore joined to a cannon of an oak, supported on the south side by a stout poplar, in the middle an oak with a coped shoulder and through tenon (that runs through the scarf), and on the south another oak post. Put together, we guessed that the bent weighed in around 1800 pounds. No joke!
In this post, I’m going to rewind back to June of this year when Wabi-sabi hoisted its first timber frame bent to vertical. (A “bent” is a cross-sectional assembly of posts and beams, part of the framing of a timber frame structure.) This particular bent was composed of two roundwood oak posts, and a hewn black walnut beam, with a span of around 18 feet. No small feat!