First Frame Finished

We had a special assistant this week. Dan, a friend of Bernt's from work and also a furniture maker, offered to take a week of leave in order to help us out with the timber frame. It was such a lovely gesture and really helped get us underway with the frame making.

First we laid the timbers out over a full scale drawing on the floor of the workshop. Then we marked out and cut all of the joins. We are using traditional joinery i.e.; mortise and tenons (the tenon is like the top of a piece of Lego which fits into the mortise hole) and later some dovetails. It is slow work (especially with me at the chisel… Ill get quicker…) so it was super helpful to have an extra set of hands.

Frame pieces laid out over full size drawing.

Cutting joins.

 

Dan cutting a tenon.

Next is a lot of shifting and fitting which is pretty difficult when it comes to such heavy beams. We relied on our handy engine crane as well as tensioning straps to pull joints together (and apart). A little bit of sanding to smooth the beams a touch and then it was time to peg up (I make it sound so simple don’t I…).

Engine crane and straps helping move and pull together the timbers.

 

Elaborate strap setup to pull the rafter and collar tie beams together.

As we are doing this the traditional way we are using wooden pegs (like thick dowel with a taper on one end) rather than bolts to fix the joints together. Initially we thought that splitting and shaping a few hundred pegs was going to take us forever so I looked into having some celery top pine dowel made up for us. It was doable, through a local contact but he instead showed us how easy it would be to shape them ourselves using an angle grinder with a ‘flapper’ disk attached, kind of like a pleated skirt made from sandpaper. Making them ourselves meant that we could split the wood (with an axe) rather than cutting it which gives the pegs so much more strength so we decided to give it a go (when you split the wood it breaks along the grain rather than potentially cutting through grain thus weakening it). With the assistance of a wonderful peg making ‘machine’ than Dan built us we have found we can ‘whip’ up pegs in a reasonable amount of time.

Bernt testing out Dan’s peg making ‘machine’.

 

Birth of the first peg.

Dan proudly cradling the first peg.

 

Bernt hammering in the first peg (we have yet to make ourselves a proper wooden mallet).

 

The first frame finished.

The next problem to solve was how to stand up the frame. I looked into crane hire but there are some concerns about the 28 tonne crane sitting on top of our waffle pod slab so we are now pursuing other options. More on that when we get to that point. For now, Bernt and Dan felt confident that they could stand up part of the frame by manpower, with the assistance of the concrete walls and scaffolding. Before the beams could go up though, we had to construct steel brackets and screw them into the floor to locate and bolt the beams to. Dan set up a little welding cave in the bathroom (notice how I’m now referring to things as rooms… coz they have walls and are staring to feel like real spaces!). He pumped out some brackets for us while Bernt drilled holes and I gave them a coat of rust proof paint. Late Friday afternoon, with the brackets safely bolted into the concrete slab, we set to heaving the first posts into position. It went well, apart from a scary shudder when the concrete wall acted as a stop for the wall post.

Dan’s welding cave aka the bathroom.

 

The finished brackets getting a paint job.

 It’s a very cool sight to see some timber go up, I think the build is really going to start looking like something special when the first full frames go in. Bernt and I have just finished pouring a couple of concrete columns for the wall posts that will sit outside the floor plan (as part of the veranda) and this week hope to get frame 2 underway.

Pure manpower makes the walls shudder as the beam comes to an abrupt halt.

 

A tenon fitting into a mortise, ready for pegging.

 

First part of the frame in place!

 In other news, we had an electrician in this week to put a proper power point at the water tank for our pump. It means that the lights in the ger no longer dim when I turn on the tap…