Can You Use Green Wood In Timber Framing? - Part 2

we get asked all the time how long the timbers can sit around so like if you're slow at chiseling and you take eight years to get all 52 timbers cut and ready to assemble there's no question that the one that you cut on the beginning of that eight years will have changed quite a bit compared to the one you did yesterday so does that affect things well ideally you would cut out your entire timber frame in a month and then put it all back together the next month but life is real and life is the way it is and you just make it work so for instance let's say that you had a a post a b and a post and you had this all cut out uh two years ago and now you're putting them together and it turns out that this beam here is slightly twisted so that now this post right here is six inches up in the air at this end because of this twist well if you leave it there for four or five days it'll settle right down to the ground just that weight and you might even put some weight there and so all of the lignum and cells and everything else in here will take on the shape that you wanted to take on and you might even be able to get away with putting it up and then with a chain hooked to the other end of the building just or come along and just click it over a click at a time over a week or two and get it to be back in place there's always a way to make these things happen it's uh you don't need to to think that it must be done a certain way the species that you've chosen will have a lot to do with what happens certainly if you built the whole thing with red oak and you take eight years to get it all together it will be difficult to put together but if you do it with pine and you do put it together in two years it'll work out fine there'll be a little bit of twisting here and there but you'll be able to bend it back when you do bend wood back you do it very slowly come along is a great thing to do you go click click and walk away the next day click click and walk away again and you'll be able to get things to be where you want them to be it's never it's never a disaster it's just more little problems that you deal with so the question is if you're milling your own should you mill them all right away or mill one or two and then mortise and tenon them and or whatever and then later mill some more what you're trying to achieve here is a certain amount of uniformity so that everything happens kind of the same so obviously you certainly should mill all of your timbers and then stack them like this so that the day that you start doing mortise and tenon joints and so on all of the timbers are there they're accounted for they're stacked and and even numbered so that you know what each one is going to be doing another question that we often get is what do you do with your logs so you're cutting your own trees let's say or you're buying a truckload of logs and they get dumped in your yard what should be the first thing you do well the first thing of course is to get them off the ground because the the the kinds of bugs that get into trees relate to the ground so that means using a couple of logs as bunks and then rolling all the other logs on top of those the second thing would be to get all the bark off as soon as you can if you're not going to be milling them right away you should get the bark off because the bark protects the beetles the lichtus beetles and others that eat what the bark has to offer and then start to work their way into the the new part of the log here's our log and about this much of it is nutritious to all those beetles so they'll come from the bark and start working their way in and out of this so you'll notice that they're doing that to the first two inches so when you're milling often that all gets cut off anyway so the mill will often get rid of all of that but uh you're better off to get rid of the bark first to cut down on that uh totally the worms the the beetles and so on uh defecate all over the place in their little channels and uh that's full of fungus and that quickly turns into rot so you you also want to be sure that there's no water exacerbating that that problem if water gets into all of these little channels and so on it makes the wood soft and more edible and you'll get more of that infestation so yes get them off the ground get the bark off and then with the bark off they could probably sit there for quite a while so people are asking me about ideal times to to do this process the cutting down of the trees for instance that is best done in late summer or fall if you do it in the spring when the juices are madly being sucked up into the tree the water content is quite a bit higher the uh but as far as cutting and having things sitting around and so on i would not be all that preoccupied with with worrying about timing because what is more important is your life so you're leading your life you're taking kids to school you're going to work all the other exigencies that happen those should be the priority the advantage to worrying about the wood minute to minute is very small it's just not worth worrying about it so if you get it all done within two years that's fine you don't need to lose sleep over it just two weeks ago i milled a big pile of logs that i've been meaning to mill for 20 years this pile has been sitting out here for 20 years and all the bark had fallen off by itself and of course it was quite riddled with these worms and yet we found that probably 80 of those logs made wonderful timber there were a few uh holes here and there but the animals were long dead and uh that would be an extreme of how far you can go with wood 20 year old stuff totally unprotected it was all pine and we made it eight by ten and six by eight timbers to create a 48 foot long shed on the side of a barn when you do that kind of thing you do want to be absolutely sure that there are no live termites bugs beetles the beetles are the worst in that wood because it could go from your new quote new timber to the rest of your building so you certainly want to be sure that they're dead so let's say that you have put up a building and the wood is shrinking a great deal so we have here a post and we start off with a sip panel let's say that has been screwed to the post and 10 years later the post has shrunk away from the panel so this classroom here is now 20 years old and none of this happened there's no shrinking away from the from the sips but it's conceivable and i was once uh asked to be a witness in a lawsuit where the red oak timber frame uh had trunks so that there was you could see right through here there was like a half inch of space and that was because it was green oak which does that a lot so that was repaired later by just putting cove molding in all the corners and that building actually looked more fancy than it did to begin with so this was done everywhere that a post was against a sip panel but that's the only one that i've ever seen in 45 years of building timber frames that required that it was an extreme case and the building was actually taken down eventually because all of the windows broke it was an extremely expensive building it was close to a million dollars and the lawsuit was quite uh quite extensive well thank you for watching i hope that this uh calms you down a little bit i can uh tell you that we've built thousands of homes with uh timbers and and sip panels and so on and have this business of green wood has not been a problem with the occasional odd building that you know one in a thousand cause problems so feel courageous go out there and cut out your timber frames if you do have any questions or problems feel free to contact us we're here and happy to help out thank you for watching and we'll see you in another video hey there thank you for watching here at shelter institute in woolwich maine we teach a wide variety of house building and timber framing and carving classes we'd love to see you here but if you can't make it to maine to take one of our classes our online class is available at shelterinstitute.com [Music] you

Channel: Shelter Institute

Views: 84,796

Keywords: timberframe, homebuilding, how-to, designbuild, thinkbuildlive, timber frame construction, timber framing, timber frame house, timber frame, timber frame basics, timber frame class, timber frame school, timber frame course

Id: w9fInVuqeHU

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021