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Build Your Own House
Starting Your Own PC Business
The Serial Tourist's Guide to Jerusalem
Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts
Questions? Comments?
Copyright 2005 by Morris Rosenthal
All Rights Reserved
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Guide to building a timber frame home
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You can't clear a lot for building a home in New England, without cutting
down some trees. In this case, we helped clear a lot for a neighbor, or at
least we started:-) This brought us some very nice sticks of Eastern White
Pine, which is great for trim board as well as structural members. It's also
incredibly light compare to the White Oak that we built the actual timber
frame with. The machine we used for milling the tree into lumber was a Wood
Mizer.
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The Wood Mizer come complete with hydraulics to do pretty much all of the
work once you get the tree loaded onto the forks. The hydraulics then lift
the tree up onto the saw mill, where another hydraulic arm can spin the trunk
into the position you want and hold it into place. This model comes with
a debarker, which helps preserve the life of the band saw. The debarker (below)
runs about a half foot ahead of the band saw (below right) cutting a narrow
slit in the bark. It's not so much the bark that wears out the band saw but
the dirt and grit that get into the bark over the life of the tree.
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Next it's time to start creating flat surfaces. The first cut created a flat
on top of the log, the next pass of the Wood Mizer is actually creating a
2" plank, albeit one with a very irregular edge. We set these unfinished
boards aside on the lifting forks as we move along. Below we've turned the
log 90 degrees and are slicing off the top again. The final squared log (below
right) is about a foot on the edge, and we sliced the whole thing into 12"x1"
trim boards.
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Skipping ahead, the next log was processed into 2"x3"s. Since out timber
frame needs a sheath around it and we're using Larsen Trusses for the job,
that means a lot of 2"x3"s and a lot of plywood. That's why people who tell
you that timber frames are very wood efficient are talking a bit out of turn.
If they're building a timber frame with wad and dauble (staw and sheep manure)
walls, then it's truly a wood efficient structure. I suppose that also true
if they use stress skin panels made from polyurethane and polystyrene. However,
if they basically stick build a house around the frame to keep the weather
out, it's not the most efficient use of wood I can imagine.
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