Our third week of woodwork kicked off with the entrance of a new member to the team- Graeme. Graeme took part in Paul’s first year apprenticeship program, where he and the rest of the group constructed and erected the quite impressive timber frame structure for the main house, in addition to building the foundation and stone stem wall. Graeme had come, direct from Edinburgh, to help guide us through one of the more challenging woodworking tasks we’d be facing here- the construction of roundwood knee braces for the workshop and cruck-frame buildings.

The knee brace, though small relative to the other structural timbers, is quite essential to the stability and rigidity of any timber frame building. The knee brace is installed at a 45 degree angle bridging posts and beams, and in so doing introduces a series of triangles into the building frame. This triangulation transforms what is likely to be a wobbly frame into a rigid structure, more apt to handle high winds and whatever other environmental forces might be applied to the frame. The need for such a brace was unwittingly made clear to Graeme who had laid down for a rest in a hammock hanging from one of the workshop beams, only to find that the whole building was swinging right along with him. After that, a couple of us attempted to shake the building ourselves, and once again it moved in tow.  It was quite interesting- and a good lesson- to see that, despite the great weight of the roundwood post-and-beam frame, without the proper bracing it was actually quite easy to push around.

Like all of the timbers in the workshop building, and some in the cruck frame, these knee braces were going to form saddle joints with the posts and beams they would be adjoining. In concept, this is a fairly straightforward joint. The approximate profile of one timber is carved out of another, so that when the two come together a seamless joint is made. We all soon discovered, though, the real art involved in achieving a tight fit between three curvy pieces of timber meeting each other at an angle. Making this work involved a mixture of some rough calculation and a lot of intuition, constantly moving between the bench and the frame to bring the different pieces of wood ever closer together.

We did find that, as with much of the previous woodwork we have done here, the great deal of the work in fitting these braces was in the fine-tuning of the fit. Yet, after a lot of hand carving, gouge sharpening, and some power grinding, we were very happy to see a row of braces stretching quite organically between the structural timbers of the cruck-frame and workshop. Though there are some extra considerations to be made in working with the rounded timber, it’s hard to beat the beauty of the naturally irregular forms you end up having built into your home or building, the braces looking almost like branches growing from a tree.