Section II, Timber Frame Garage

 

Raising of the beams. A big day is the raising of the wall assemblies. Once you see it in raised into the air is is quite fulfilling. My friends came over to help. Placing the concrete footer slab.Mixing bags of concrete by hand in the wheel barrel. Did the whole footer this way. Boy was that work. I put steel mesh in the footer. The 12" blocks will sit on top of the footer and most of that will end up under ground. It's a shame isn't it? Laying the block was fun. The first course is a little on the tricky side since the footer isn't perfectly flat.
That poor car. Boy did I abuse it. When I had to move the 16' green oak timbers to the second floor we would load it into the Toyota and drive it around the house and up the hill. I tied the timbers to the Toyota and dragged them over Kingdom Come. Since I often had to move these 450 pounders on my own, I had to be a little resourceful at times. Big Dozer.This is the biggest dozer I ever saw up close. It is used for doing large earth moving chores. It will clear an average garden in one pass. The top of the tread is above head level. Nothing to do with the garage. I just like the picture. Its a man thing. Dozers that is. Like Ferraris and that other thing.
A collar tie being test fitted into the dovetail pocket.The fit is precise. In the photo below you can see the finished collar tie inserted into the roof beam. The weight of the roof has the tendency to spread the beams apart. The half dovetail joint gets tighter as the beams push out. Pegs are actually not needed. The collar ties lock as pressure is applied. I pegged them anyways.
Collar tie and roof beams. Whoops. The wooden mallet is obscuring your view of the "half" in the half dovetail joint. Darn. Anyways,... Note the wood removal tools- 1. Four inch belt sander. 2. My grandfather's Porter Cable circular saw. 3. One inch commercial drill. Burned the sucker up in the course of building the barn.
L-R, Steve Williams, Frank Guiney, Dave Trost, Paul Ruby, Stan Rohrbach, Don Widener,Doug Johnson. We just finished raising those roof beams you see behind us. They weigh 600-800 pounds each and we pushed them up by hand using ropes and sticks for safety. Big Dozer.This is the biggest dozer I ever saw up close. It is used for doing large earth moving chores. It will clear an average garden in one pass. The top of the tread is above head level. Nothing to do with the garage. I just like the picture. Its a man thing. Dozers that is. Like Ferraris and that other thing.

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