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Timber framing

Gabriola, Life, Random, Sketchup, Timber framing
For real? That guy?
09.10.09 | Permalink | Comment?

I spent an hour or so on this drawing this morning, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. As annoying as some of these more difficult drawings are, it’s going to be so worth it in the end. After seeing that piece of shit James bought last week, I’m starting to see my drawings in a different way – they make this craft seem like Ikea furniture in some ways, but in many ways they are the most informative drawings I’ve ever looked at on this subject. Nothing seems to go into the detail that we get. Or if it does show you excellent details, it usually has shit for a description. This book has such amazing drawings (I swear) that probably anyone with a basic knowledge of tools who is half literate could build any of these homes. Add in James’ descriptions of what is going on in the drawings, and it seems impossible someone couldn’t do it.

After I finished that drawing I went to print a bunch of stuff for James, and then checked out how they were doing with the log jig. Zack put a brand new blade on the chainsaw so they would have real nice cuts, only to fire it up and find out Jan had mixed up some screws and one that was too proud collided with the blade. After he put the old blade back on they finished the cuts, but apparently there is about an eighth of an inch discrepancy overall. I’m not sure, but I’m assuming that’s due to the foundation being built out of scrap timbers laying in the yard.

I also spent a couple minutes this morning making some shirt designs for each of the building courses. I’m not sure if he’s going to want to make three different designs, or maybe just combine them into one design of all three buildings. Or maybe he’ll hate them all. Not sure.

Here they are:

That’s the Bents course design.

This is the Post and Beam design, but I liked the side view of this building better than the gable, so I did this one too:

This is the point where the blog post comes screeching to a halt due to exposure to a photo of my love I shouldn’t have looked at. I guess that’s what you get for being curious. Karma sure does work quick when it comes to the little things. Fuck you Flickr.

I love you Captain. I wish I had you to hold and pat your butt. I was never allowed to tell you, you were my favourite, but you are and always will be and I miss you so much.
Animals, Gabriola, Life, Log building, Random, Timber framing
Canadian Cobras Can Celebrate, Choose Not To
07.02.09 | Permalink | 1 Comment

Today was Canada Day, and all kinds of people were partying all over the island. When I got up this morning, I went to the school to see James, and touch base with him since I’d been off the island and without Internet for a week. After touring around with him and getting a new assignment that is going to be a bitch to figure out, I came back to David’s and hung out with Holly for a bit.

We got hungry and went for lunch at Harvest Thyme again, then we drove down to Brickyard Beach to watch all kinds of people shoot homemade potato cannons into the ocean. It was pretty impressive how many people were there partying. Every time the cannons fired – whether it flew 5 feet, or five hundred – the entire crowd clapped and cheered like it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen. It’s funny to me that a bunch of fairly rich people gather together to shoot potatoes into the ocean using PVC pipe and a BBQ lighter.

We stuck around for maybe a half hour, and then I met a nice dog who had the coolest looking eyes. His name was Kita. His owner was nice, and let me take a couple pictures of him. I keep wanting a dog. After hanging out with Honey so much in the last little while, I keep thinking how nice it would be to have a pooch to hang out with me all day.

Especially one with eyes like this!

Later on, Holly and I went and toured the school. I showed her the building we just made, and the ones that other guys had made over the years, then we wandered over to James’ new lot. Everyone was there enjoying a celebratory beer after a long day of stacking stones. I introduced Holly to everyone, then showed her the huge waterfall James had dug while he was excavating. We headed back to the school, stopped a moment to pick some cherries, then toured the classroom. Eventually James came back from his new lot and gave Holly and I a walk through his current home. I love it, and I’m pretty sure Holly did too, so now all I have to do is design and build one similar. Should be simple.

It’s now 4:20 am, so I think I’ll go hit my joint a couple times and then try and sleep a bit.
Gabriola, Life, Sketchup, Timber framing
Cobras can’t win
05.31.09 | Permalink | Comment?

I feel like the purpose of this weekend was to test my limits when it comes to patience, and disappointment. I’m ready for it to be over with. I didn’t have a fire last night – the tide won. I didn’t even smoke the joint I rolled while talking with Holly about how much I was looking forward to going to sit at the fire. I’m about to go do that now. I slept most of the night, and woke up around 2am to discover that the file I had left transferring, which prevented me from doing anything else with my machine (I hate you skype, you POS), had crapped out just before finishing. So, that’s a bunch of hours wasted that I could have been working.

Today, I’m either going to get some work done, or try and overdose on pot and juice. One of those is possible, I’m sure. I suppose I already did some work – I designed that house up there for James. It looks like a peace sign. I need to get together with him now to find out how to make it work. I need to add some supports to where the roofs meet, but I’m not sure where, or what type of joints to use. I thought getting to this point was going to take me 5 minutes but, I’ve been up working on this since 7am. I’m frustrated and miserable and haven’t smoked pot since yesterday afternoon sometime.
Gabriola, Log building, Timber framing
Post post.
05.30.09 | Permalink | Comment?

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.