Can you build with green lumber?

call me crazy but I think I just saw a bunch of snowflakes fly through here jesse is playing the game find things that look that was using last you know there's a very small chance it's up in the trench right there this is a real-time video guys while we have a little bit of down time we're playing cleanup and catch up there are a handful of videos that we've had in the queue for six months to a year things we've really wanted to talk about but we simply haven't had the time so we figure there's no time like the present to start creating a handful of these videos hold on Jesse says we have to turn on the garage lighting does this mean I get a fire up the crockpot yet or not yet yeah I think these gas cans are going to be an elephant gift what does an elephant get that's something that you like a gift no it's not a gag gift it's like something you'd give away because you don't want it oh but it's a gift great just spent a lot of time and energy getting our gas can problem under control and now I have gas can problems again and I've got gasoline everywhere my sense of humor is very low for gas problems I think we should create a perfume and we'll just bottle gas up and we'll just sell it is off-grid perfume because what they don't tell you about going off grid is that you basically always smell like gasoline so one of the most common questions and probably one of the most misunderstood topics around our timber-frame and building our frame has been using green timbers and not drying the frame seems like there's this massive misunderstanding about kiln drying dimensional stability construction methods and stuff and so we thought we just stop for a moment and share some of the details around this subject I think if you just stop and really think about the the roots or the history of post-and-beam framing as we have the records which people have passed on and there are books and things that have kept this knowledge alive nobody had a way to dry a timber five hundred years ago so all of the obsession with kiln dry really stems from the last seventy years of what has become known as stick framing or stick construction so a lot of folks are under the impression that if you if you build with green lumber your house is going to warp and twist and fall apart and have endless problems and there is some truth to the concern about dimensional stability but if you think about it for a moment some of the oldest living structures that are wooden are timbers timber frames posts and beams and they're fine and those frames were all built green why did people build green timber frames well it really was a functional reality of construction they didn't have modern kiln technology so it wasn't even an option second of all and beam construction really had its roots in getting your construction materials from your land it's only in the last 100 years that we've come up with this idea of transporting building materials over hundreds or even thousands of miles to build structures nobody did that they would fall a tree they would use it to build a structure within a few hundred feet of where the tree used to live and there it was and so there was no need for kiln drying first of all because they didn't need to transport anything very far whereas today a log goes from maybe 20 30 50 miles in the forest to a mill so it goes over 50 miles on paved roads then it goes through a mill and then it goes back on a truck and is driven tens hundreds or even thousands of miles to a lumberyard and then it's transported again from the lumberyard to wherever the building site is so that log has a multi-hundred or multi thousand mile journey so the reason that's an issue is weight becomes a problem when you start moving things over long distances so moving green Timbers over long distances it's not very economical but moving Timbers over long distances also isn't economical so we don't we don't dry timbers because we're not moving them very far doesn't make sense to do so so some timber frames are dried there are timber framing companies out there who do have modern kilns of different variation of types and they do dry the Timbers but it has a very real consequence in that wood for example in order to generate a 10 inch by 10 inch beam that is kiln dried you're going to need to saw a 12 inch by 12 inch beam and then while that beam is being dried very fast maybe in two months or so in a 100 10-degree environment it will twist and then the beam must be taken back out and put back through a saw to generate the 10 inch by 10 inch beam that is square so you have a tremendous amount of waste in using dried Timbers to build a timber frame these companies that kiln dry their timber frames typically do not use typically wooden joinery which kind of is another technology that has come from the last 100 to 150 years which is steel they're using almost exclusively steel bracketry that circumvent the need for wood joinery so it doesn't matter if the timber is wet or dry because the steel doesn't really have any bearing on the moisture content of the wood whereas when you cut joinery in a piece of wood the size of these timbers green timber is much easier to work with it's more forgiving it's easier on your chisels it's not nearly as abusive to the cutting edge and it's more pleasurable to work with so you can shave off very small amounts instead of ending up with a lot of splintering which is a byproduct of drying the timber so I want to just address a couple of things about kiln drying because it seems like there's a really big misunderstanding about how kiln dried lumber works for whatever reason the general population seems to think that when you buy lumber from the lumber yard it's dry and anybody who's been around any amount of lumber knows that a unit of lumber is full of all kinds of junk it is very rare to get stable lumber especially for like dimensional lumber um structural number for framing which is what we're all talking about here we're not talking about cabinetry or furniture we're talking about a structure so when when they take that wood and put it through a kiln oftentimes the lumber is dried as a unit which means it is completely banded together and placed in a kiln and then it's heated to a pretty high temperature for a few days or sometimes only a few hours and then it is removed and it is put into transit the theory is that the pieces of wood in the middle of the unit are wet because the kiln only dries the outside boards that's just how drying works if you stick a loaf of bread in the oven the outside is going to cook faster than the inside right why do we always check the inside to see if it's done that's the last thing to cook so a kiln is no different the board's at the deepest center of a unit are not going to get dry so they over dry the boards on the outside and they under dried the boards on the inside and in theory in transit and in storage the moisture content will even out among all the boards never works every single unit of lumber you cut the band's and usually the outermost boards will have Kruk bend bow Wayne every problem you can conceive because they've been subjected to extremely high temperatures and very rapid drying typically the board's in the middle are very heavy compared to the outer boards that's because they're not dry yet so while they often are very straight and they look really good as soon as they get hit with the Sun what do they do they bend and twist and warp so I just want to clear that up about kiln dried lumber it is not the saving grace of construction while it does Purdue more dimensionally stable lumber any contractor worth their salt would probably admit that most lumber is anything but dimensionally stable so we already know that this timber is going to move throughout its life the moisture content can be anywhere from 25 to even 35 percent and in its driest state once it's in a structure it might be closer to 20 percent or even less so we know it's going to move so how do we solve that problem so there are two supercritical things that we do in a timber frame to help control the amount of warping and twisting that takes place in the frame the first thing and perhaps the most critical is we actually oil the frame both the end grain and the face grain we do that with different substances the end grain we actually use a very waxy oil and the goal is to actually retain the moisture the face is a more thin oil which is a mixture of linseed citrus oils things like that but again timbers or would typically dries faster through the end grain than through the face grain so by waxing the end of the Timbers we're slowing the drying process down the reason that wood warps is because these cells in the wood dry faster than the ligaments in the wood can stretch so if we slow dry wood it will be more dimensionally stable but if you heard me slow dry sounds about counterproductive to our modern economy consumerism everybody wants everything now so the time between a tree being harvested cut into a board and put into a structure could conceivably be less than a couple of weeks which means there's no time for drying so our goal with these Timbers is to have them dry very slowly so that they are less likely to warp from the stress of drying too fast there is going to be some checking cracks that's going to be a natural process as the wood dries in fact with this little piece you can already see the radial cracking that's happening from the heart out but that drawing is very much on the surface there's a kind of general rule of thumb it's not a perfect rule but it says that wood dries about one inch per year so in theory this timber when it's completely oiled could take as many as eight or ten years to fully dry so that's the first thing we do is we use oil to actually retain the moisture in the timber instead of trying to get the timber to dry fast the second thing that works in our favor is the joinery as the frame is assembled all of the joints are sucked extremely tight and since all of the wood is roughly the same moisture content it's going to dry roughly all at the same rate so when the joints are put together a technique is often used called draw boring where the peg that is used the hole is offset slightly from the hole that is in the tenon and the job of that offset is to suck these joints extremely tight so as the frame dries that tightness increases instead of having a loosening or a gapping of the so the most critical part of this is that the moisture content of all the wood needs to be pretty much similar so for example if we were to say mil half of our timber frame last year and half of it this year it stands to reason that the moisture contents of those two woods would be dissimilar to some degree and there may be some conflict because once quite a bit more dry so in theory it's best to mill all of the Timbers for a frame in a very narrow window of time cut the frame and raise the frame in a fairly narrow window of time so that you don't have any room for accelerated drying such as from the Sun and you also don't have time for differentials in moisture content these pieces of wood when we cut the scarf joints for our frame the shelter crew deliberately did not sever that cut until the very last minute because the very outermost wood would begin to dry and just that fast it became very difficult to slick very difficult not the right word more difficult so at the very last minute we would finish the cut and slick the joint which means to flatten the joint that way if the wood had any time to dry it would not be as it would be less difficult this wood has been sitting outside for a month and I can tell you just by feeling the end grain that it has already dried to some degree even though it's been raining for a month so that kind of gives you an idea how quickly the face grain or the end of a grain can actually lose its moisture so one of the first things that we did as our logs arrived was we applied what's called anchor seal it's an end grain sealer we applied that to the log because that immediately inhibits drying in fact I can tell you just by feeling the end of this log that's been sitting here in the rain it feels dry and this these logs were cut less than one month ago but of course the center of the log is far from dry we are leaving the bark on these trees that's not in really advisable because bugs can get in them and destroy the wood but it does help to retain a little bit of the moisture that's a good and bad thing left on there too long and the log will start to rot so there's a narrow window of time in balance everything's not balanced right and then one of the things that we do with timber frames and I'm sorry I don't have a peg to show you I threw it away literally one hour ago is when we drive a peg the peg is extremely dry so it will not change size in fact as it's driven into a wet timber it will take on some of the moisture that's in the frame and it will swell up slightly there was a couple of pegs on our frame that are on an exterior wall and on the exterior wall the pegs need to be driven flush with the timber so that we can put our structural panels on the outside there was a couple of pegs that had not been driven in so they were flush on the outside I took the sledgehammer up there just one week later and tried to drive those pegs in and they were not going to budge so they are a harder wood than our frame they're made from oak and our frame is made from Douglas fir that's important so that they have more shear resistance than the frame does itself so that the frame cannot shear the peg off if it were to have so much tension from drying in second of all those pegs are bone-dry for for wood so that as the frame dries around them the joint only gets tighter so going back to how it embarrass originated with modern technology it takes two months or so to kiln dry a timber that is roughly 12 inches by 12 inches and as mentioned earlier it's going to warp and twist so it will need to be sawn again if you think about how timber frames originated people needed a structure they needed a barn or a house and so they didn't have time to deal with drying so if we were to take those same 8 by 8 or 8 by 10 Timbers and sticker them like we have this lumber and then sit around waiting patiently for them to dry out it could be several years before those Timbers would be ready to build with so what we've done to compensate is in the structure we're not going to use wood heat inside right away because it would introduce a lot of dry heat into the frame and that would accelerate the drying in a bad way so we're hoping to use the radiant heat down the road in our timber frame which is a more gentle heat it's a lower temperature heat and it should allow the frame to dry more slowly of course the most ideal would be to not live in the house for ten years and barely heat the house so that the frame dries very slowly but we like the early timber frame folks don't have time for that so we have to be somewhat gentle early on with the frame and not overheat the house or we could end up with a lot of the problems that people anticipate having with Timbers part of the reason that we sticker lumber fairly tall is so that the weight of the upper boards helps to hold the lower boards in the shape that we want so as they dry they dry flat and we end up with a flat board it's not uncommon for the upper boards to get a little bit of cupping or something going on and then because they don't have enough weight on them we could add weight we may do that later but that also works for us in the timber frame as the joinery works hard it actually resists the warping and twisting of the timber that's why the time between the frame being cut and the frame being raised in all the joinery being completely pegged needs to be as short as possible so that the joinery is helping like the weight of the stack of lumber to keep the frame straight I guess there's a lot of other reasons that timber framing can be done green but I'll share one other thing that is a factor for modern-day stick framing we build houses so fast that having building materials that have excess moisture in them can actually cause damage to the structure when the house wrap and sheathing is applied to a stick frame structure and then sheetrock and insulation are added to the inside of a structure the moisture that's in the wood can linger and so it's pretty important that that would have already had some drying take place this is really a consequence of modern day construction being so fast but our timber frame will be completely exposed on the inside of our house so there's no rush to get it dry in modern stick framing construction we don't ever see the frame it's completely invisible nobody actually knows what's behind the sheetrock or behind the sheathing and the siding no but do you wanna know horsey because it's ugly it's not particularly attractive while it is cost-effective and efficient so it's important for that method of construction that dryer would be used for the structural components so that you don't end up with mold mildew rot things like that but in our timber frame it doesn't matter because the frame will dry slowly over time and we get to enjoy the beauty of the frame so it's just one more reason it's nice to build with Timbers over stick building this doesn't really have to do with drying necessarily but there are a lot of really wonderful books out there about post-and-beam framing timber framing and what you might not see because we have so manipulated stuff in our modern world is that the postin beam was a like a reactionary or a circumstantial building method that developed out of material availability okay it's so much to say today it's one of the first sunny non rainy days we've had in a while so he's out and about trolling the building site so in the past people designed their house around the available material so if they had small trees they built the structure that could use small trees and big trees they moved victories today we've gone the other way and we've created a universal material so it doesn't matter if it's a big tree small tree blue tree pink tree we create structural materials out of that so that we can build stuff in it no one cares what size or what availability of material there is look dad doesn't want you rub on him dad's annoyed Vicky wants to play tape-measure yeah it done what he's a woman that always loving that are greeting so saying that we today have created standardized materials everything is 16 inches on Center 24 inch on center 4x8 sheet goods doors are this size windows are this size everything is standardized so nobody really cares anymore where the product came from in fact very few people will ever meet the tree that is supporting their roof and timber framing is not that way in its roots I'm not saying that modern timber framing hasn't become that because we've become so accustomed to making things look like they weren't natural materials that nobody really even knows what a natural material looks like but the beautiful thing about timbers and I think knowing this now I'll share this maybe more in detail in a future video but we would have designed our frame differently had we known what trees we would be using to cut the frame because it was actually very difficult to get the Timbers that we needed to build this frame and so that's just a harsh reality of the evolution of construction we've we've created this system of building that takes all the the natural aspects out of it and you end up with a very standardized construction method that has no soul well dad what's doing you say something about a crock-pot def permission to who thinks they're gonna put him can I sit oh really I said I said like I wouldn't get it totally winter comes from yeah I think that maybe in closing or to share that will link to a few video or a few books that we've read on timber framing that really if you want to get deeper into this and understand the whys and how's of it all and the history of it all it's the most beautiful thing so well testings Alyssa's favorite book first because it has a lot of pictures and I like picture books but click like read more or whatever for the rest of the books yeah there's a ton of stuff out there and more mature people I can only just give a fair disclosure that if you aren't true if you want to fall in love with timber framing don't read these books Bugaboo did you know that this generator is remote start you know what that means that means when we're laying in bed we can turn it on yep and it will filter the hot tub are you seriously taking a bath on a generator and you're looking his tail while you hold it over here I'm serious here I'll hold it I'll hold it here what's your favorite part of timber framing both fish sharpening my claws on the woods you were just like laying it on thick usually you're laying it on thick huh

Channel: Pure Living for Life

Views: 525,439

Keywords: timber frame, timber framing, green lumber, kiln dried, construction

Id: CkES4EXMPhg

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017