This is a mid-post I made for the log building we are working on. The joinery is much the same as timber framing, as far as layout and dimensions go, but the cutting and tolerances are much different. All the rough cuts, and even some of the finish cuts are done primarily with a chainsaw. Because the building we’re making is fairly small and basic, it has only a few mid-posts, so we decided to make them in pairs, so everyone got to do at least half of one. I paired up with a dude named Dave, from Ontario. He’s the only other Ontarian in the course, but that’s not why we paired up – we were both just ready to move to that phase at the same time. Our post was peeled by the instructor, and he also milled the two flat parallel edges, using the Wood – Mizer portable mill. Because the faces must be perfectly parallel, and because we can’t operate the mill, we just had to watch while James did the work. I did basically all the layout and we shared the cutting.

Once we had the joinery laid out and cut, we had to route a dado groove down the  centre line on each flat face. This is to accept a spline that connects the log in-fill stacks to the posts. After that all we had to do was cut it to length, and finish plane the sides so it looked nice.

Dave over-cut his routing, but mine was sweet. Unfortunately I didn’t snap a picture before we flipped it over.

Another neat thing we did was see a demonstration of James’ new rig he designed. Basically it cuts a huge stack of logs perfectly plumb, which makes our in-fill logs the perfect size and on the perfect plane. It’s an old setup, improved upon greatly. It took less than four minutes to cut about nine logs, perfectly plumb with each other. If we had to do this without his setup, it would have taken a lot longer, and been far less accurate. I took a video of it in action, but I won’t put it up on the youtubes until I have made sure James is okay with me doing so.