Timber Frame Conference Day Two

Although the conference ran through the weekend, I had only signed up for the pre-conference workshop and Friday, the first full day of the conference. A full lineup of presentations and demonstrations was on the agenda. I started off with "Dumb Buildings, Smart Buildings, and Wise Buildings", presented by Lisa Sasser. I was expecting something along the lines of how to build new, "green" buildings, or maybe things like passive solar, etc. Although some of these topics were touched upon, the presentation mainly focused on the preservation of historic structures, but with a decidedly environmental slant. As Lisa wrote in the overview of her presentation, "It's time for the preservation movement to absorb some of the lessons of the environmental movement and broaden the focus from preservation to conservation--not just of buildings, but also of communities, livelihood, and a sense of place." 

After her lecture when she opened it up for questions, a woman sitting across the aisle from me asked something to the effect of "Why isn't there something like the CCC that can build these beautiful and durable public structures as they did in the depression?" It may have been more of a rhetorical question, and Lisa essentially talked about budget deficits,etc., and another person in the audience said you'd have to try to get funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. So I chimed in, "you know, we do have Americorps, which may not have building trades as its focus, but it does work on projects similar to those of the CCC such as trail restoration, along with things like working with inner city kids". I know this because my daughter decided to spend her first year out of high school as an Americorp volunteer instead of going immediately to college.  

The woman who asked the question shot me a look that seemed to say, "You just ruined the point I was trying to make", but Lisa said, "I'm glad you mentioned that because the same kind of community building that Americorp is trying to accomplish is very much in line with the timber frame tradition." It's nice to get that kind of vindication when you stick your neck out in public.

During the break I wandered out back where several demonstrations and hands-on activities were taking place. Some kids about 10-12 years old were working on a timber frame play structure under the guidance of seasoned timber frame experts. It looked like fun, and I was sorry I would miss the raising. Here are a few shots.

Another demonstration was the hewing and adzing, where a round log was turned into a square timber. The process was quite laborious and time consuming, but I like the look that hewing gives to the timber. Here are some shots of that.

And then Barr Quarton fired up his portable forge. The wind was giving him some problems, but he still managed to guide several people through forging a coat hook. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. Flattening the hot metal between the hammer and anvil felt unexpectedly satisfying. I didn't get a good shot of the hook, but we basically flattened one end, tapered the other, twisted the middle, and then hooked the flattened end. The tapered end was bent 90 degrees so it could be driven into a beam. Here are some shots of the forge and anvil.

 


I spent most of the afternoon outside, even though there were several presentations I had wanted to attend. Oh well, maybe next time. Then there was a mixer with hors d'oeuvres and beer, and then dinner. Timber framers are pretty interesting people, and I enjoyed hearing the stories of how they came to be involved with this craft. I felt a bit of a poseur, having to admit several times that I wasn't even an amateur.


Saturday morning I took the hotel shuttle to the Spokane airport and caught my flight to Seattle, where I met my wife. My daughter, who is an Americorps volunteer, as I mentioned earlier, has to make a decision about which college she will attend in the fall by May 1, so we thought we would help with moral support.


After meeting my wife and renting the car and getting lost, we met up with our daughter working with about 20 other volunteers painting the hallways of a middle school in the Queen Anne neighborhood. She wasn't quite finished, so my wife and I walked around the nearby shopping district.

As we walked around, something kind of clicked in my brain about timber framing and Americorps. I guess seeing those kids working hard on a Saturday sprucing up a public building made me realize that a collaboration between timber framers and Americorps could work. And if twelve year old kids can build a frame, just about anybody can, at least with the supervision of experienced framers. And as Lisa Sasser had suggested, community building is an integral part of what timber framing is about.

Timber Frame Conference

The 24th Western Regional Conference of the Timber Framers Guild is being held April 23 through April 25 in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. One of the pre-conference workshops on April 22 is on how to use Google Sketchup for timber frame design. I had tried playing around with this a bit on my own, but found it quite challenging, so I decided to sign up for the workshop and get some hands-on experience.

So far, it's been a lot of fun. The workshop was a little overwhelming, but well worth it. Even though I make my living as a software engineer (or maybe because of it), I sometimes find learning new technology to be a pain in the brain. But the class was taught by Clark Bremer of Northern Lights Timber Framing, who has created a set of plugins for Sketchup specific to timber frame design, so he is the Sketchup for timber frame guru. Sketchup is a powerful 3-D CAD program that Google offers for free, and the plugins and "rubies" Clark has developed allow frames to be designed quickly, as well as the associated shop drawings and timber lists. It's pretty amazing what he has come up with, and he has made his work freely available.

And timber framers tend to be pretty interesting people. I met Barr Quarton of Barr Tools, who makes timber framing chisels and other tools specific to the trade. I'm looking forward to his forging demo tomorrow.
 I also talked to Mike of Montana Reclaimed Lumber, whose company salvages timbers from old barns and other structures. I had a great conversation with him about trees and timber, and we ended up talking about the importance of the remaining old growth forests. Here's a shot of his exhibit booth, built from some of his reclaimed timbers:

Here's a 2-D rendering of the frame we "designed" in class:

The Sinker Log

The next project on the agenda is to finish off the ceiling with insulation and paneling. I've been waiting on this until the stove pipe was in place. The wood that I plan to use for the paneling is from my "sinker log", so I thought I would give a little history on that particular episode.

Early last summer while walking along the creek, I noticed what looked like a plank or timber about 8 feet long under the water, embedded in the gravel. I'd read that wood that has been continuously submerged does not rot in the same way as wood that is exposed to air. I had also read about salvage logging operations in the Great Lakes and rivers of the Pacific Northwest that retrieve logs that sank while being floated to mills a hundred years or so ago.  So I thought I might be able to get some usable wood from this plank.

After digging in the gravel around the plank with my hands, it became clear this this was not a plank or timber at all, but a round log. It just looked like a plank because only a foot or so of its surface width was visible. From the curvature that I could expose easily, it seemed to be about 3 feet in diameter. I remembered that the neighbor who owns the property across the creek had said there used to be a log bridge across the creek, but it washed out about 50 years ago. This log must be a remnant of that bridge.

Even though digging out a log this size would be a much larger endeavor than the timber I took it for, I decided to go for it. Over the next three or four weeks I would spend about an hour of my time at the property digging the gravel away from the log.  A short handled hoe worked pretty well for moving the gravel out and away from the log, and I used an iron pry bar for loosening the larger rocks that were wedged tightly against the log. I also did a fair amount of digging with my hands, ruining at least one pair of gloves in the process.

As the log became more exposed, I would periodically try to move it with the pry bar, but for the most part this just proved to be a good way to bend the bar. After most of the upper half of the log was exposed, I tried prying with a steel channel beam. I had used this on other projects around the house that required levering heavy objects, such as the 3 foot diameter granite rock I moved from the front yard to the back.

But the log still did not budge. The channel beam easily slid under the log, so I was able to get a pretty short fulcrum length, but it would not move. I was ready to admit defeat.

But not just yet. The channel beam was about seven feet in length, so I thought of how I could make it longer. I puzzled for a while, and then remembered a piece of driftwood that had been kicking around down by the swimming hole. It was about a 2x12, about ten feet long.

So I inserted the channel beam under one end of the log, and wedged a good size rock under it for the fulcrum. I then slid the 2x12 along the top edge of the beam and wedged its lower end between the beam and the log. The other end of the board jutted at least two feet out of my reach, so I looped a rope around it, holding an end in each hand. I worked the rope up the board until it was near the top. Then I just pulled down.

The board moved down. I first it just seemed to be pushing the fulcrum deeper into the gravel at its base. But it kept coming, and before I realized what was happening, the end of the log just popped out of the water. I let out a whoop. Victory!

I repeated the procedure on the other end. The log was free! Here's a shot of the log just after it had been dislodged. It looks like it is floating up a bit, but I actually wedged some large rocks to prop it up, as my original plan for raising it was to just successively fill gravel back under it.

The gravel fill plan quickly proved unworkable. Getting the log to rise a couple of inches out of the water was easy, but the weight to lift increased geometrically with each successive inch.

The next method made used of some 4x8 beams left over from the cabin construction. These were between ten and sixteen feet in length, so they made very nice levers. I alternated between raising the log from one side, and then repeating from the other side. But this also encountered the phenomenon of increasing lift weight as the log was raised. I couldn't seem to get much more than about half of it out of the water before the other side would slide back down.

So now I brought out the big guns. After sliding two of the 4x8s under one side as deep as possible, I tied the rope over the end of each beam, then pulled the loop under the log and back over the top. I then attached another rope to this loop and hooked it up to my little come-along winch. The log and rope now acted as one end of a pulley. As I cranked the winch, the log slowly began to emerge from the water, until it eventually came to rest level on the 4x8's. Here's a shot after I had buttressed both sides.

The log could now be milled in place with my Alaska style chainsaw mill. Here's a shot after the first couple of cuts.

As I milled each slab, I stacked it back in reverse order. Here's a shot of the completed stack. The pink paint on the ends is to reduce checking.

 So what is the connection between the sinker log and the ukulele, as I mentioned in a previous post? Well, as I began researching on the internet whether this wood could be used for structural purposes, I came across some sites extolling the virtues of submerged wood for musical instruments. Apparently after years under water, wood develops micro cavities in its cellular structure that increases its resonance.  So I thought it would be cool if I could have an instrument built from this log I had discovered on my property. I had recently renewed my interest in the ukulele, having taken it backpacking and jamming with my brother-in-law on his daughter's child-sized guitar. He could really play that thing, so I was inspired to start increasing my repertoire and learning a bit more.

However, after the first few slabs had been cut, it was apparent that this was not the tight-grained old-growth that I had been hoping for. I counted about a hundred growth rings, with the inner rings being pretty widely spaced. In addition, I wasn't sure if the log was douglas-fir or ponderosa. Douglas-fir is a decent tone wood, not the best, but pine is not even worth considering.

But I contacted a luthier I found on the internet, and after confirming my assessment of the feasibility of using my own sinker wood, he told me he had just started work on a tenor ukulele using reclaimed sinker redwood from Mendocino, along with claro black walnut. My old uke was a little soprano, and even though it was a decent instrument, it was a little plinky, as sopranos tend to be. So I decided to just go for this custom tenor. I am so glad I did. It is a beautiful instrument, and it sounds great. Here's a link to the website:  Little River Ukuleles

Ok, so there it is, the ukulele connection, tenuous as it may be.

Leak is Fixed!

Looks like the last patch job did the trick, at least mostly. There may still be a micro leak, because some of the wood near the previous leak looked pretty wet, but I think once I apply the butyl flashing tape it should take care of it.

I built a fire in the stove and raised the temperature from about 48 degrees to 67, but it took a couple of hours. Here's a shot of the stove after it had burned down to coals. The boot is just to give you an idea of scale.

Leak Fix Attempt #3

My wife and I made the trip back to the cabin on Saturday to try again to fix the leak in the roof. I ripped up most of the patch job I had done last weekend. I decided that part of the problem was that I really couldn't get good access from the ladder angle I was using. I was having to lean over and reach around to the far side of the chimney, and it was awkward and precarious.

So I repositioned the ladder so I could get direct access to the chimney area. This proved to be a much more comfortable arrangement. The other problem was the black pipe cement I had used to try to fill the gaps between the chimney adapter and the roof. That stuff was clearly the wrong stuff. So I tried to clear it out as best as I could. Then I squeezed the silicone caulking directly into the gaps, and then filled copious amounts around the base of the chimney adapter. Still looks ugly, but I'll deal with that later.

A small irony in this saga is that when we arrived home, we found that the dishwasher had leaked out onto the kitchen floor. The garbage disposal went out a few days earlier, and it was the first time running the dishwasher since then. I had verified that the water from the sink was draining, but apparently the outlet from the dishwasher was clogged. It wouldn't have been that big a deal, except that we had installed a hardwood floor there a few years ago. In hindsight, probably not a great idea, but it did look great. While cleaning up the mess, I really had this feeling like the universe was trying to tell me something. Not sure what, but maybe something like I would have been a lousy plumber.

It is supposed to rain today, so I'm hoping I'll get a chance to drive up and see if my latest chimney patch worked.

On a side note, here's a link to my ukulele premier debut on youtube. I'll explain the ukulele connection to the property is a subsequent post, probably entitled "The Sinker Log".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFZB8yWAWrQz 

Plan B Report Card

We had a pretty good rain on Sunday, so my wife and I drove up after work on Monday to see if the roof was still leaking. Even though I had placed the bucket where the previous leak had been dripping, I was a bit nervous that the leak might be in a new spot, and potentially damage the floor.

Well, good news and bad news. Good news: the bucket caught the leak.

Stove Installation - Plan B

Over the next few days various formulations of Plan B began to appear in my brain. There was Minimalist Plan B, which was to remove just a few screws from the pipe boot so I could get better access with the silicone caulking gun. Radical Plan B called for losing the pipe boot, re-caulking everything, and sealing over the pipe boot screw holes with some left-over pieces of metal roofing.  Compromise Plan B was somewhere in between.

My wife had other commitments on Saturday, and she made me promise not to go up on the ladder without a spotter, so I recruited her brother, Scott. He has worked in construction and various other building trades, so I was very glad to get his help and any advice he might have to offer. And he's a great photographer, so he would probably get some nice shots for the blog.

The roof had leaked quite a bit, but the bucket had done its job. We assessed the situation on the roof and determined that the Minimalist approach wouldn't cut it. Scott thought we should remove the pipe boot completely, but I felt that half of it seemed to be water tight, and removing it would expose the screw holes. I removed the screws from the side that was leaking, and cut that side of the boot off. I cleaned off the silicone mess and then reapplied more silicone caulking generously.

We ran out of silicone, so we made a trip to the hardware store about 20 minutes away. In addition to more silicone, I bought a wider storm collar and a roll of black flashing tape. Scott advised mass quantities of silicone, so I pretty much emptied the other tube when we got back. It still looks pretty ugly, but it just might work. I'll probably apply more silicone and finish off with the flashing tape.

Here are a few of Scott's pics: