volunteer work on timber frame or primitive building projects?

[NCEric]

I'm wondering what opportunities there might be for helping out fairly short-term with other people's alternative building projects, probably not for pay but maybe for room and board or alternative arrangements like that.  I'm also wondering if there are sites where opportunities like this might be listed.

My son is about to turn 18 and is especially interested in more or less low-tech/alternative/self-sufficient/primitive type building projects, .  He hasn't completed it yet but he has the roof on a round log saddle notched 10x10 cabin he built with logs he harvested off our family's land.  He's considering spending a few months somewhere different, possibly between multiple locations/projects, mainly in the Southeast, maybe a little into the Midwest.

Does anyone on this forum have ideas for how a young person could find timber frame, log building... projects to lend a hand with for a learning experience and a chance to experience life for a little while in a different place?  Is anyone aware of any particular interesting owner-built projects happening this winter where the owners might be willing to host a helper?

[TreefarmerNN]

Impressive for a young person to go in that direction.  There's a guy on Facebook, Mark Holmberg who has/is restoring a cabin in Tennessee.  He's an interesting guy, journalist, brick mason etc.  My cousin worked with him at a newspaper some years ago. 

We're restoring some old sheds but it's a catch as we can on time so that's not a lot of carpentry work.

The National Park Service has an intern program along those lines.  They also pay something to the interns.

Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia may also have a similar program but I don't know that for sure.

[beenthere]

NCEric
Does he have college aspirations? 
Going to a trade school would seemingly be a good place to encourage him to go, if not. 

What are his math scores in HS? 

Hobbies or interests? 

Sports in HS ?

What aptitudes has he revealed to you or others in the family? 

Maybe a timber frame class like Jim Rogers holds a couple times a year would be of interest? 

[NCEric]

Thanks for the replies and the ideas!

To answer your questions, beenthere...

He has no college aspirations and he's not really interested in trade school either, although he might be interested in working for someone in the trades for a while.  There's lots of work on our little diversified family farm he could do, and he very much enjoys that kind of work (hand milking cows, building little things for the farm, fixing things, tractor work, hoeing, etc.), and maybe he'll take more interest in our farm in the future, but at the moment he's just really wanting to do something somewhere else and be out on his own.

He hasn't done calculus, but he's good at the math he's done.  There are a lot of woodworking/building and other projects he's taken on that have required quite a bit of math: adding and subtracting fractions all the time in the woodshop, trigonometry for calculating angles, geometry for figuring out potential yields of boards/beams/etc. from logs...

His latest interest is deer hunting.  He carved himself a really nice stock for a bow and fabricated a slick trigger mechanism from some scrap metal and killed a few deer with it while he was up in Michigan helping his grandfather with the corn harvest.  Last year he stripped some chestnut oak bark off some firewood and used it to tan some kind of hide he had and made a belt and cut and stitched a wallet for himself.  He just bought an old David Bradley walk-behind tractor (kind of like a rototiller but with a PTO and interchangeable attachments) for $100 and with help from his grandfather got it running again.  He wants to take the rear end out of an old riding lawnmower and make something like a cart that he can use to ride behind the David Bradley.  He wants to make some kind of non-electric water stove (so without a pump, probably thermosiphoning) to heat the cabin he's building, maybe with an old propane tank and firebrick and cob...  Those are the types of hobbies he has.

He's not big into any sports.