Hey everyone. Been a while since I have been by..I'm curious in what you haven been up too there willandhelen. We took the class a while ago, built a log home, then I built a 16x24 foot shed using what I call "post and beam". It's not timber framing as we didn't use pegs and joinery but used connector plates and lag screws. Our posts where eight by eights and our beams where six by eights. Went up pretty fast..just over a week of actual work time. Board and batten outside and trusses with a metal roof. Simple, and while not nearly as elegant as true post and beam it's quite nice.

The book that gave me the inspiration for this project was Rob Roy's "Timber framing for the Rest of Us". I have (and have read) a couple of Benson's books as well as some by Sobell. I love the timber framing craft, but I didn't have the time to learn the skills to do it. Rob's method is certainly simpler. I think if you took your time and dressed a post and beam home up a bit it could look very nice. I would think quite honestly that Rob Roy and Skip would have gotten along very well.

So...willandhelen or others who have experience with this. I have a couple of questions. One of the problems I had was that our timbers tended to bow a bit. A few had some twist to them as well. We worked some of it out (crown side up helps ) but it just wasn't as clean and neat as I would have liked. Kinda like the logs in my house How did you handle imperfections in your timbers? Just experience? A better sawyer than I had ?? Have extra timbers and then pick and choose?

I'm planning on building a larger workshop this fall on some property we have in E. Tenn. So I'm trying to figure this out a bit more and make it better. This one will have SIP panels. Planing on using either Eastern Red Cedar milled on site or having some Eastern White Pine hauled in.


Keith