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S pan tables, like the one in Appendix A, will serve for roof design with most structures. With heavy roofs, such as earth roofs, adequate tables are very hard to find. This Appendix shows how to check the girders and rafters in a heavy roof design for shear and bending. Once you have followed through […]

Using Span Tables Table One is an abbreviated version of Table R502.3.1(2), from the International Residential Code for One — and Two — Family Dwellings. This particular table, just one of many in IRC codebook, is for floor joist spans for common lumber species, and assumes that we are designing for a residential living area […]

Following are some views (Figures 5.41-5.45) and details of the completed sunroom. Jaki and I are glad that we have gained a beautiful new room as a result of this book… realizing that we wouldn’t have built it otherwise! In case you’re curious, the materials cost was about $4,000, or $20 per square foot. We […]

With the timber framing completed, it was time to fill in the wall panels. We used the small lower panels beneath the windows as training panels for students at the building school, but, as we got higher, Jaki and I pandered to a dream which wehave had for a long time: to make the most […]

In the previous chapter, I told of the double-roof system, with false or secondary rafters over the real ones, and insulation as the filling of a plank sandwich. But the new sunroom extends the shallow 1:12 slope of the main house, and we wanted to continue out with the earth roof. If plank-and-beam is my […]

We used the same spruce two-by-six tongue-and-groove boards for the roof deck (sunroom ceiling) as we used for the floor. The most difficult part was tearing up a couple of feet of the earth roof on the house, so that we could marry the new roof to the old. I was pleased that the new […]

We had the same deck situation upstairs as downstairs: planking span was starting to get rather extreme about six feet from the main building. But, this time, we could use a simple and rather elegant solution not available downstairs: short secondary rafters. They are, I suppose, a kind of double cantilever, but 1 think the […]

As with the four-by-eight floor joists, we used two different methods of extending the five-by-ten radial roof rafters. The existing rafters, protected by a good overhang, were in excellent condition and extended between 18 and 23 inches (43.7 and 58.4 centimeters) from the cordwood walls. On the east and west rafters (which eventually would have […]

Traditional timber framers will make all their bents ahead of time, and have them stacked in the proper order, waiting for the big day when plenty of help is gathered together for the raising. Lots of bodies wielding poles, as seen in Fig. 2.17, lift the bent to vertical. The poles can also act as […]

Chainsaw Fig. 5.25: Chainsaw. The author cuts a heavy timber supported at a convenient height by sawhorses. The saw cut can be no better than: 1. The accuracy with which the pencil marks are trans­posed to the timber. Use a good carpenter’s square and mark all around the timber, to make sure that — after […]