iDRY Vacuum Kilns

Sponsors:

Hickory Timbers?

Started by Don P, May 15, 2017, 08:08:46 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Don P

The roof metal is now on and trimmed out and we've had our first big wind... I drove by the next morning and the excavator and owner were already there checking it out too  :D. It impressed several of the old farmers at the store and took some trees and that was without the edge metal on yet so I think we're good.

This is the North, road, side. It was and will again be boarded over with a sliding door on the right hand western shed, we've already sided down the west timberframe short wall. That is our prevailing from the right, west.


The east shed is open. There was a light frame wall across the aisle between the cribs. We have room to make that a double slider. There was a tack room at the far end where the "different" roof transition occurs with the south shed. We still have that room intact and may rework it back in there.


Midway down the eastern shed looking between the log cribs into the western shed. The loft catwalk is at 9' and runs across to access the upper lofts in the log cribs. The lumber in there is for the loft floors.


Continuing on down the eastern shed to the south shed and looking West. We all want lots of windows on this end. Since the logs need to settle but the tf cannot I had them put in the post and beam assembly against the log crib to hold this shed in place. There will be a sliding flashing at the wall to roof above when we side that gable end.



Walking down to the end of the south shed and turning right to look northward through the western shed. We're trying to get this wing buttoned up first for lambing.


That's where we are now. I brought a bunch of our slabs and bycatch into the haybarn for siding recovery over the winter and we've taken 10 pickup loads of firewood out of the pasture, and as you can see in the background of one shot we still have all the original, mostly rotten logs to try to decide what to do with. There is another nearly identical barn on the farm so we might kick the can down the road and move it all over there.

Don P

I moved the big toys over to the other log barn on the farm and started on it, which means I moved antique poop out for half a day. It is another 2 crib log barn at the core with northern and southern TF sheds. The metal came off major portions of the north side and about a third of that shed collapsed, the rest of that shed is badly rotted. The plate on the log crib that side is also in trouble. Structurally this one is in better shape than the other one and it was built a little better to begin with. We aren't going to try to bring this one up to as fine a level, basically repair the north shed, make it functional and do whatever has to be done elsewhere. These are a few beginning pics.

South shed and east end. The daylight to the right is where the collapse happened around the north side. The door on the south is a drive through between the log cribs, about 6" too low to drive the Lull through, darn the bad luck. I may to a little measuring and digging and repair on our way out.






Standing in the western end of the north shed, the drive thru between cribs on the right looking at the collapse. Shed rafters dangling from the log wall plate. Water running down into that shady organic pit just about ate the bobcat in there. The remaining shed plate was really off that post and supported on a tiny bit of siding. I fabbed up a steel angle gusset and attached it to post and plate to secure it temporarily as we dismantle that shed. It is very tender right now.





Outside looking back at the collapsed shed



  

Looking down the south shed, you can see all the plates are shot. The lap siding is chestnut so I'll try to be careful with it hoping to clean it up for rustic wainscot in the hunting cabin. I wasn't walking on the roof, the ladder was to get into the work basket when I boomed up there to start removing metal, you can see a few sheets I dropped off this afternoon.





This is a reminder shot, figure out the real load path. The load path should be the notched log corners. Look at the left door buck, that bowed 1x, that is the load path for that left log corner, something's up in that left hand corner.





Another something's up pic. This is just inside that low door on the south shed. That scarf is open and you can see a little thrust roll going on. I'm betting the post has leaned right and the knee brace has jacked it up. Pretty nice ladder hanging there. I found some rotting harnesses and bridles in the muck on that floor and a single bottom horse drawn plow in that bay. And dropped into a groundhog den.





I'm going to take straps and comealongs tomorrow and secure the log plates together so they cannot roll outward as I remove the shed roof. I noticed they had drifted out on the tie tenons. I'm figuring the relish is probably split out on them beyond the pegs. I can draw them back together hopefully and hide a steel plate on top.

WDH

This one will keep you challenged and busy. 
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

samandothers

Look forward to the posts and pictures as you work your magic!

Don P

We've gotten the north shed removed and done a little cleanup. Looking it over more as we've worked, it is predominantly chestnut. The roof laths over the log rafters are hand rived chestnut. It looks like it had 2 shake roofs, the first nailed with cut nails the second with wire box nails. Then we've seen both 3V and 5V barn metal up there. The north shed with the collapse problem had run into trouble between the first and second shake roofs and much of it was rebuilt with sawn oak rafters and sawn chestnut 1x6 skip sheathing, sort of a mix with some remaining log rafters and some oak sawn rafters. The majority of the repair area is what collapsed this time, I'm guessing the wind strips that corner of the roof first, that front left corner where the shed was in the pic below has the longest fetch up the valley and least protection from the wind.

This is where we left it yesterday with the north shed removed. The Lull is parked in the center drive thru and there are some of the chestnut roof boards leaning up on each side in that drive through, that's the angled stuff you are seeing in there. My skid steer is in the front left corner of the barnyard, that the yellow thing there for scale. The far right bay is TF rather than log.




This is the top plate of the log wall supporting both the main barn roof and the north shed roof before we removed that. I don't want to remove and replace this plate, that would entail lots of work and funds but you can see serious rot damage towards the far end. I'm trying to figure out how to work in another beam under it. The plate and log rafters are step lapped and pegged. You can see someone cut out several tie logs between the cribs up under that beam and there was an access to what was another loft up there. There are notches that indicate there were joists and a loft up there over the drive through at some point.




The ties between plates are drop in half dovetailed and then blocked tight. As the dovetail shrank it withdrew a couple of inches. You are looking at the outboard end of that retracted dovetail in the left upper in the plate in this view, then the block beside the strap which is around a half lap between plate sections, which is pegged down to the log below with a 2" peg, the plate is shimmed up to level here with a pretty ugly shim... I'll bet he meant to get back to that and forgot :D That is a shed rafter coming back towards us in that pic and then a bit of the tail of a main rafter heading up and over the log crib to its right, there is another far left in this shot and you can see a bit of the step lap rafter mortise there. The rived, split, lath boards over the rafters and some 5v tin over that. The plates and ties are poplar.




We removed the tumbled rock wall that was under the north shed sills, or what remained of all that. That was the treasure trove thus far. One pressed glass medicine bottle, a pint whiskey bottle, 3 plow points and several hinges, one door roller and a few rusty chunks of who knows what. Doubtless all sat on the sill and then fell into the loose fieldstone. We'll rebuild that shed as an open shed for round bale storage so I'll put in stone piers to support 6 posts for the new shed roof.

34 years of wedded bliss today, great steaks and an apple pie 8). I pm'ed back and forth with Furby today, he was laid over up in Salem but alas we couldn't hook up this trip. Hopefully he'll be back through this neck of the woods before too long.

samandothers

Congratulations on the anniversary!

The project is interesting and a plan is taking shape.

mike_belben

Incredible to think of the physical labor of putting these up.  Thats enough work to last a mans entire life.  


Are all of these sitting on rock footings or do any have buried posts like today's pole barns ? 
Praise The Lord

Don P

Funny you should ask :D both of us are about sick of digging through the rocks that used to support that shed we tore off. Both barns sat on loose dry laid fieldstone. Over the years those have toppled and then become buried in the muck. The rocks under the corners of the log cribs are still there, at least the ones we've gotten to thus far. At that age and without treated lumber... probably at that age and even with treated, any earthfast buildings are long gone.

The labor involved in building this with nothing but axe and chisel is impressive, there isn't a saw mark in the original work. A few of the rocks had the skidsteer on its nose just scooting them around. That was all hand work.

 For where our new shed posts are going we dug  2' square holes 2' deep and poured those full to just below grade using bag mixed concrete and putting a lot of the smaller rocks, cleaned up, back into the mixer to make solid footings. We extended rebar up out of those footings and will build stone piers above grade to get the new posts up out of the dirt.

Back when I was mucking it out on the first day, the wind was blowing and I got something in my eye. I figured it was hay or antique manure and kept waiting for it to work itself out. I finally went in to the eye doc this week and we ain't sure what it was but it was well stuck into my cornea. It took her a good bit of digging to get it out and then a round of antibiotic eye drops and a stern lecture about safety glasses and coming in sooner. But its all good and her assistant said "You're just like my husband" so we decided its just a genetic defect and there isn't much hope of a cure.

I rehung the south shed door the first day and got it rolled out of the way on that side, the door is shot but the track and rollers can be made serviceable again. We saved the track off the collapsed north shed and will put that across the log cribs over the north side inside the new open north shed to close off the drive through. We found one of the rollers. After work today we went down the road to pick up a log on a nearby farm that the new owner wanted sawn up... fence wire hanging out of it so that was a bust but there is a collapsed barn there so we commenced to poking around and found 3 more of the same type of door roller and more track so we need to talk to him about that, hopefully a trade of some decent wood and we can make that happen.

On the first barn there was at one point a wooden silo on the north end. While we were working I found the old 5/8" steel rods that hooped it in the weeds. For the ties up top where the plates are spreading on this barn we'll try to use that rod to run across and pull them back into line. We straightened one back out pretty easily, very malleable steel and seems to be in good shape still.

This is a quick sketch of what we've come up with for the new shed post line so far, there was a stone wall under each group of 3 posts on each side of the drive through with a sill, we now have footings poured under each of those locations. Up top the pair of long plate beams is where we have the spreading problem going on where I might run the old silo rods across between them to pull that back together or at least hold it from getting worse. The double line up at the peak is where I'm trying to figure out how much that has sagged to give the plate spread I'm seeing;



mike_belben

Any idea what era these structures are from or known history on it?  Ive got to figure its 5 or 10 grown men working full time for a year or more to go from trees to barn.  
Praise The Lord

Don P

I couldn't say with any certainty. The first barn, I know the family was here by the 1790's, the brick house that is the homeplace is old hand fired brick and stands where the original log house stood. I'm pretty well certain the barn was not at all new at the time of the civil war so I'm guessing the first half of the 19th century. My feeling is this barn is older but can't really say, my feeling is early 1800's on both of these.

The haylofts were hand loaded, out of the wagon in the drive thru up into the loft and then packed back in, quite a chore. Underfoot at that hayloft door is a cutout in the floor to drop hay into a feeder in each crib below. The feeders below are large dugout logs about 18' long with a tongue at one end that slips into the gap between logs and on a rock at the other end, these keep them off the floor.

The first barn had been reworked several times, it had a harder life and went through more changes and so was also in rougher shape. Around the 1950's someone cut out major sections of the upper logs way too close to the corners and didn't reinforce them, for throwing square bales up. Those short corner stacks of logs were rotating and just waiting to spit out, it was missing a good opportunity to collapse but not by much. Use changes as farming changes but he really didn't understand the structural damage he was doing. By the same token if a building is not useable it dies of neglect. I'm making changes to allow some equipment and hay to be stored in these. Hopefully that will preserve them and give them a reason to be maintained for a good while longer.

These barns were and are a major undertaking, there is a lot of heavy material and heavy handwork involved in these... try hewing a beam sometime, that gives me great respect for these men. I'm hewing with a sawmill and lifting with hydraulics and still find plenty of ways to strain. The dimensions these guys held with their axework is something else, time has taken its toll but measurements of their workmanship come in mighty close, they were good. We were talking the other day, nowadays we think of logwork and timberframing as arts unattainable by typical folk. These were probably built by farmers framing in the way of their time. They were just building with the materials they had in the ways they knew.

mike_belben

I will be building a round timber barn with lagbolts and metal joinery..  actually have tried hewing a few recently and thats what made my jaw drop seeing how much axe work was in these structures.  Those were some calloused hands and worn out rotator cuffs!   One side of one log was enough for me to build an alaskan mill!  



Did these timbers get treated with anything over the years to keep rot and insects controlled?  
Praise The Lord

nativewolf

In those days the farmers did everything by hand and were doing so by a young young age.  If you lived, a big if, long enough to become an adult your muscle structure was simply different than us soft modern gents.  Also, they normally would work on timbers for a year or more while doing other things too.  They'd stockpile timbers until the actual raising work (normally).  Actually getting the barn up was  community affair and people would sometimes come for a week if the location was very rural (like Don's area) so you might have a dozen or more folks working to get the structure up.  Mules were the tractors and they'd have gin poles working leverage.  Then in that area (my own family history is grim in this topic) they might have rented slaves for a week or two to help out.  Lots of richer families that owned slaves rented them out to poorer farmers when they needed them, much like renting any other equipment.  Sad times but that was one way timbers were hewed and it bears mentioning.  Thank goodness for technology.

That said, there are some die hard timber frame fans that hand hew today.  

Point here, don't be too hard on yourself Mike.  They might have had great muscles (because they had to) but if there was any opportunity to exploit technology or other labor savings they took advantage.  Even then the barn might take a couple of years to get built.  They'd have dropped the ax and taken your sawmill in a NY min.  In fact I think you'd have done just fine, better than me for sure.

DonP:  I was wondering how they roofed this barn?  Chestnut/oak shingles?


Liking Walnut

mike_belben

I hadnt really thought of that but i guess youre probably right.


Death by farming firewood for me.  My joints are not up to the task of hewing at all, just not enough miles left.  Ive got to get 30 more years out of this chassis.

 got a pretty good pile of debarked logs now.  Hoping to start laying them out in the coming year and raise as bents with a winch and jinpole off my forklift.  So im trying to make note of how the simpletons of yore made a structure stand 200yrs.
Praise The Lord

Don P

Ditto here, the pounder is about pounded  :D

The purlins over the rafters on this barn are hand split, rived, chestnut boards, or laths. It has had from what I can tell 2 shake roofs on it, the first was held on with cut nails, the second with wire nails. I know the Point Hope furnace, the first in our community was in operation by around 1800, but nails could also come in from outside the area. That furnace was started by the family of the neighboring farm to me. The remainder of that farm sold 15 or 20 years ago and passed out of that family's hands, the deed was a large land grant, signed by the king. When they came to the area there were 8 families in this part of the country, animals were brought into the barn each night for protection. I saw the other day where the eastern cougar was declared extinct in Feb this year. The last official sighting was in 1938 with unofficial sightings every year. We have removed most of the predators or really lowered their numbers compared to what the settlers had to protect their livestock from. After the Revolution the first court in the county was held in his barn and he represented the new county in Richmond. I do know he bought a mother and daughter from Africa when down there and released them in his will. He did own other slaves. There is a slave row in the cemetery near the first barn we worked on. Most farms here were smaller subsistence farms though. I've wondered if the real knowledgeable labor force that moved around building these barns was slaves, I don't know. Families were large at that time as well. It amazes me the number of people that lived in those little log cabins, tight quarters, incentive to work outside as long as possible each day.

I doubt these logs and timbers were ever treated. I like to give everything a good borate soak. I think we have 150 lbs or so in the first barn at this point and the owner sprayed again last week, cheap insurance.  You never know what you are getting into in an old building. I'm pretty sure what I scraped through on the floor was lime but have also disposed of some old brown jugs, something to keep in mind when you're working on old stuff.

brianJ

incentive to work outside as long as possible each day.    

Also no TV or forestry forum to soak up hours each day.    Even with all the hand work the early settlers did, a lot would be accomplished working steady with all those hours available.    Heck even clumsy Brian would get the hang of swinging an hatchet at the correct angle.

Don P

I haven't updated this in awhile. We've dug 6 pier holes to support the posts and beam that will support the new shed roof. We poured footings to a bit below grade and then collected rocks and began laying up the piers. We were close to getting that wrapped up when I got bit in the hand by an angle grinder so we stepped away from that till I healed up, it's about there.

We then dug the old silo tie rods out of a farm trash pile and straightened them. With a little help from the smoke wrench the old nuts freed up and we got them working again. We then cleaned out the loft floors,well they weren't really floors so we supported them and laid some temporary planking and then bored through the top plate beams, inserted the 5/8" rods through some 8"x8" x 1/2" square washers we made and brought the rods in from both plates on opposite sides of the barn in 7 locations spaced down the 60' length. We've gotten some large turnbuckles we'll weld between the rods so we can snug that all up. Right now there are straps around the plates cinched up fairly snug trying to counter the spread and roll the plates have undergone with the rafter thrust over the years.

One plate is rotted down to about 25% and spans 18' over the drive through. Rather than remove roof and replace, the purlins are hand rived chestnut boards, I went to the steel manual and modified the steel beam calc with some C channel design values and sized a C channel for the outer face with an angle iron ledger welded to it to support and reinforce the existing beam. We have that in the shop and took measurements for fabricating that last week. I'll add some more C channel design values to the steel beam calc and update that soon.

This past week it rained most of the week so we brought some logs into the haybarn and made up a few post and bolster assemblies. These will be welded to the stone piers and a new plate beam will run across them to support the shed rafters. We had a break in the weather Wednesday,  so we pulled some sawn stuff out of the haybarn and made more working room then went over and got the Lull out of the mud and manure and back inside the log barn then went out and grabbed 3 more white oaks. We sawed them up Friday so we should be able to finish the post and bolster assemblies this week in the rain.




samandothers

You have been busy despite the angle grinder bite!  I thought about your angle grinder encounter this week as I was cleaning cross members and cutting off screws on my trailer cross members.  The old decking needs replacing.

Don P

We've almost got the rafters up on the barn shed.




We should finish the commons this morning then we'll saw 4x6 square edged ones for the gable ends and begin skip sheathing. Looks like its going to go down to the wire. I've torn my right shoulder in 3 places, they'll be cutting the 20th so we're trying to get the roof back on and then put this to bed for awhile.




I gave my partner a raise at the end of the day yesterday so he could get a birds eye view.




samandothers

Sorry to hear about your shoulder, not good.  Barn is looking good.  I like the bat/owl perspective!

Don P

My partner got the roof metal on and buttoned up. There is a lot more work that can be done on this barn but this will really slow down the demise that was underway when we first saw it. Water is no longer running down the logs. It's now a good place for equipment and a few bales. There is a little cleanup to do, I drove the bobcat and loader for a little bit yesterday, then we'll call this done for now.




I've been measuring and drawing a sketchup of the next project, remodel/repurpose of a 1940's gas station that's down the road about 8 miles. I'll be doing a fair amount of phone call GC'ing on it so that should let things knit for awhile.


Magicman

Congratulations on a job well done.  In that setting and location that crib/barn looks exactly as it should.  thumbs-up
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

samandothers

Barn looks much better than at start and I am sure in much better shape!  Glad you are healing and getting better!

Thank You Sponsors!