Part 3 - Timber Framing Tutorial

Carol Reed

In Memoriam
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Location
Coolidge, AZ
Voilà ! One housed mortised and tenon done.

J Housed tenon & mortise joint done.jpg

As I said earlier, this process needs refinement before I mill the rest of them.

But I decided I would work on the knee braces next to get those tenons done and then tackle all of the mortises at one time.

So back to SketchUp. The knee brace locks the post to the header at a 45º angle.

J post knee brace joinery.jpg

I cut the 4 braces to length. Note the 'X' mark. That was to make sure I was on the cutting side of the mark.

T cutting knee braces to length.jpg

I headed over to my friend Phil's shop. He has a large bandsaw he allowed me to use to cut the joint profile on each end of the brace.

The tenons needed to be on a 45º angle and warped my brain for a while. SketchUp made things clear to me. From there I made a cardboard template to trace on each end of the braces. I needed a starting place which turned out to be 1" in from the end. I made that mark first.

P template.jpg Q mark starting point.jpg

As it turned out I could cut the profiles without having to mark both sides of the brace. A small band saw table would have forced me to work only from one side of the blade.

W cutting knee brace tenon.jpg

Then I tipped up the brace and used the band saw blade to mark the tenon cheek. Now it was back to the hand saw. First the shoulder cut. Then the check cut.

V knee brace shoulder cut.jpg X hand cutting knee brace cheek.jpg

And voilà! The four knee braces have their rough profiles cut.

Y knee brace joint rough cut complete..jpg

These tenons will need to be refined. I will face the outside cheeks with the router, but the inside cheeks will have to be pared with the chisel.

That is where I am at the moment. I will finish the knee brace tenons and then begin on the mortises.

More to come.
 
Hopefully no building inspectors for this. It is not a house. It is a frame to hold down a tarp for some shade to work under. Later it will be a gazebo and I may consider a different shade material. It may seem like overkill for its intended purpose, but then you haven't read part 1 to understand why. :)

Back in the day (20 something years ago) I took some timber framing classes, and the owner of the structures we made ran into a real buzz saw at the building department. Seems they had no books to tell them of the strength of the joints and thus insisted on metal fasteners! :thud: Another reminder that common sense and government employees do not live on the same planet.
 
I'm following along. I think I'm going to have to use your techniques for a pergola out by the pool next spring. Looks like something I could build up in the shop and pop-up over a weekend once things are fitted together up there. Looks much nicer than the cut, butt, &/bolt plans I had in mind. :thumb:
 
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