IN WHICH MIKE USES DOMINOES.........We left things with me shaping oak pieces slowly by hand. Well, you've probably seen enough pictures of my chisel-and-plane work, so let's jump on a little. You might recall I already had one corner post up. Well, here is the other one:
Note the orange line. I pulled this taut and took a mark from the centre post foot up to the string line, to give me the correct length for the centre post (which I'd already made, you'll recall). Here is the mark against the post:
Phew!! There's nothing like endlessly measuring and re-measuring a critical dimension. I have literally lost sleep over this. What if the centre post is a few mm too long or short? I can't take this thing apart once the beam is in place. It has to be right first time. I had a cunning plan though, Baldrick, which I borrowed from one I.K Brunel. More of that later......
Next job was to clean up, cut to length, and do the joinery on the big main beam. This thing is so heavy that this was the only way of rolling it over to work on another face:
Trial fit of the left hand capital:
Now, you can see this is an unusual joint for oak framing, in that it is long-grain to long-grain. Other than cheat and turn a big coach bolt in from above, the only way I could think of retaining that joint through years of shrinkage and movement was to use a domino. Yes, yes, I know. You're all bored silly of me railing against these magic-joint-making-machines..... Well, sometimes you've just got to eat humble pie:
If this beam is in wind, this thing will never work. Back to my winding sticks:
Note that they are on top of the capitals (upside-down, of course). These just have to sit properly on top of the posts. As I said, there is only once chance.
Having done all the joints, and the big chamfer off the top front edge, it was time to think about getting all the oak in to place. First up, I erected a scaffold tower either side of the beam:
Now I could safely erect the centre post, because I could restrain it using the scaffold:
Now. The cunning plan, borrowed from Brunel. Before putting the post up, I placed 2 layers of code 4 lead into place on top of the female part of the post foot:
This gives me something to play with if the centrepost is too high. I will simply beat on the top of the post until everything sits at the right height, with the lead squished by as much or as little as required. Brunel used this a lot with big castings, placing pillows of lead on top before the beams, to that everything could be levelled off afterwards.
I popped the capitals on, and used a few undersized temporary pegs to keep things in place:
Note the beam at the top of the scaffolds. That's a big lump of Douglas fir. I have a little hand winch, which I set up like this:
I managed to raise the beam off the saw horses and onto the scaffold:
That was the state of play when my help arrived at 8.30 this morning. I do all my big lifts with this chap, because he is sensible and cautious, and we can talk through every move. We carried on as I'd left off the previous evening, with the winch:
Temporary staging at various intervals provides a safety net, in case anything should go wrong. But also, at this level, we are at the limit of the winch's lifting ability, simply because of its length, and the height wasting by the strapping. From now on up it was a question of rocking it up like a see-saw on a pair of fulcrums, and raising one of the fulcrums each time. We left the winch attached in case of a catastrophe:
Finally, we got to height. That last 18 inches probably took us an hour and a half:
Moving it across was easy. Lowering it accurately on to the joints was.......erm........interesting. But, in the end, it co-operated:
I was thrilled with the centre joint:
And that nightmare centre-post-length came to nothing. It was spot on:
Down with the scaffold:
That was 4 hours work, and I then spent a couple of hours just tidying up. It's not impossible that I then might have sneaked in for a siesta.
I needed to rack the frame slightly to get everything vertical, so I set up a Spanish windlass:
I made only a couple of pegs, as I had 2 or 3 left over from a previous job:
Before whacking the pegs in, I screwed on some temporary braces to keep everything in place. I then set up a temporary workbench:
......and built the floor:
That's a fairly full day, and I need a bath.....