Tuesday 4 April 2017

Chestnut Timber Frame Summer House

This is a summer house that I built last year with my partners in crime and sawmill co-owners Red and Charlie.


All the timber came from the woods that Red and Charlie manage and was either milled using our sawmill or was shaped with hand tools. All structural timbers, cladding and shingles are Sweet Chestnut and the rest is Larch. The back two frames are sawn king-post trusses with Oak pegs and the front frame is a hewn sling brace truss with Yew pegs. The timbers on this frame were shaped using axes and tidied up with a travisher. The shingles are made by radially cleaving (splitting) a 16 inch long log into segments close to the finished dimensions. We then use a drawknife to flatten the shingle and put a chamfer on the lower edge. I think this roof needed about 1800 shingles.