Mortices and Tenons and Pegs...OH MY.

For the last two days we've been learning about Timberframing, like old school, like so cool. Apparently I am now a heritage construction and conservation nerd and I'm pretty sure I could sit and make pegs all day on a peg bench. That's right, a peg bench (see below). Or I could alternatively, be the underdog and take the box on the pit saw - cuz I'm a natural, and I'd have a wicked upper body after doing it for like a week. Timber framers are insane! Or at least old school ones are.

Our instructor Dan Addey-Jibb is an anglophone from Quebec, who studied Marketing in university and then decided to become a timber framer. He apprenticed in England and Scotland and has worked on a tonne of super cool amazing projects in Europe. When he came back to Canada he set up a company that does old-school-scribe-method-medieval-on-your-butt timber framing, and it is amazing. His company mainly builds residential houses, but they have done some amazing reconstructions of historical barns and some really great conservation on historic buildings. You can check out a fantastic time-lapse video of the raising of a huge barn in Quebec that they just recently restored, and you can look through his gallery at www.heavytimberwork.com.

Yesterday, we learned about the history of timber-framing in Europe and touched on the differences between the European-style scribe method and the North American style of square method. As per usual the North American style is not as cool or authentic. So I'm going to have to choose sides and go scribe method all the way. It's way prettier! We also got to look at pictures of all of the amazing projects that Dan has worked on, which was sooo freaking cool. Dan showed us the work of one of his colleagues in Ireland, who is amazing, insanely amazing, he even does his own carving. You can check out a video of work he did on Claregalway castle. It'll blow your socks off!

Today we got to go outside and make stuff and play. Yay! We got to look at some real mortices and tenons, and ask a bunch of silly questions about silly old english names for things. Apparently etymologically all those sayings about being Top Dog, the Under Dog, being "in the pits" and such, all come from working on the pit saws. We got to do that. It was totally awesome, and a serious workout.

Two of my classmates on the pit saw. Since it's a demonstration set, they have built these tripod saw-horse type things to  approximate the height difference for the pit. When you are on top you are Top Dog, when you are on the bottom you are the Under Dog. 

Here we are making our own pegs on a really cool peg bench. That was fun. We split the wood and then  used a scraper to shape it and a chisel to point it. It was really neat, and I got to keep mine. It'll definitely come in handy should a vampire attack, since most of our pegs ended up looking more like stakes.

You can see my classmate Kristina making a peg on the peg bench, which was a pretty cool thing in itself. It detaches for portability and works really well to hold the peg in place semi-permanently so you can rotate the peg and work on making it round. Alycia is in the background getting frustrated at the block we had to split our pieces off of to make the pegs.

We also massacred a log. We started off trying to get a feel for hewing by hand using axes. The piece of wood we had to use was not great though, it was from the previous year and it hadn't been stored properly so it was starting to rot and grow mushrooms, but we did the best we could. Though by the end of the day, after we had hewed what we could and tried auguring and making mortices and adzing (is that a verb?) the log was pretty much toast.

Here is one of us hewing. It's really quite tough to do, although I'm not sure the feel of it was accurate considering the state of the log. I'd really like to try doing it on a new green log just to see how it feels.

At the end of the day we went on a little field trip to a barn in Fonthill, ON. The documentation group had documented the barn during the summer and it was a really interesting example of the meshing of North American styles with a bit of Old World ingenuity. The lovely woman who owns the barn was gracious enough to let us crawl over every inch of the barn and explained that it had been built in 1885. Unfortunately she doesn't have the resources to restore it and it will likely fall to ruin because the township she is in won't let it be taken down and rebuilt elsewhere since it has been designated an historic building. This is an unfortunate result of some historical designations. Inevitably saving a building for posterity doesn't do any good, because it will likely come tumbling down because those who make the historical designations don't give out any money to maintain them.

A lovely barn, but it's in a state of disrepair. There is a bulge on one side of the stone wall and some of the supports inside are starting to fall down. The style is quite unique, with the dormers, the steep slope and the half-gambrel, half hipped roof.

One of the most interesting features were these huge pulleys. There were two, located in the middle of the building towards the front (southern-facing). They were used first by horse power, then by tractor, to hoist up a wagon so that hay could be off-loaded onto the upper level of the barn. Dan had never seen anything like it in Quebec, though the owner said she'd seen another like it in Bright, ON. 

All in all, our last two days have been wonderful. I've really enjoyed getting to get in there and getting a little sweaty and full of wood shavings. As well as working-in my work boots by trudging around through twenty year old "compost" and hay. I think that I'm in love with timber framing and will be forever, at least  until we have our dry stone walling class on Thursday and Friday. Oh, be still, my fickle heart.