From the plan, we know that the posts should be six feet (1.8 meters) long. With the eight-by-ten girders on top of them, this gives six foot ten inches of clearance to the underside of the rafters at the lowest point. And it is seven foot eight inches to the ceiling, so there is a cozy, but not oppressive, feeling of space in the room. The rafter clearance is a few inches greater near the house.
Jaki and I were joined by family and interested friends for the remainder of the framing and roofing projects, including sons Darin and Rohan, Anna Milburn-Lauer, Bruce Kilgore, Diane Lukaris, and Stephanie Bayan. Work became fun with this rotating crew, a huge advantage.
I cut eight-by-eights with a chainsaw. The saw needs to be well sharpened, which means that it must not only cut easy, but also true, without pulling one way The very best way to assure straight cutting is to use a new bar and new chain. The next best way is to use a chain which has been professionally sharpened with a machine for the purpose. In any case, don’t make your first cut on an important short post. If you mess it up, the post may be rendered useless. Practice your technique on a long eight-by-eight, and keep cutting two inches (5.1 centimeters) off it until you can do a good job with regularity. Finally, when you’ve got a good square right-angled cut, and your confidence is high, measure, mark and cut the other end to length.
Bruce Kilgore made a wonderful cordwood cutoff saw, for use in making very regular log-ends for his house. He loaned me the saw, and I used it to cut quite a few of the heavy timbers for our sunroom frame. An explanation of how to make this saw is shown at pages 74—77 of my previous book Cordwood Building: The State of the Art (see Bibliography). A saw like this affords great control options. The swing of the saw can be fine-tuned to give a vertical cut every time. If need be, a shingle can be installed as a shim against the backrest of the table, giving another opportunity for fine angle adjustments. See pages 124—125.
No matter what method of cutting you choose, the cut may need to be dressed a little if it is still not square. Check it again with the large framing square and mark any high bits on the cut with a pencil. A little extra wood can be removed easily with a small Stanley Sure-Form™ Scraper, which has a 2- by 21/2-inch (5.1- by 6.3- centimeter) rasp on one end, and a handle that is used to pull the rasp towards you. You can put a lot of pressure on the wood with this tool, and it can remove wood very quickly. Another tool I use for the same purpose is my 5"-diameter Makita 4000-rpm circular sander, with #36-grit sanding disks for heavy wood removal, and #80 grit for finer work. Hint: very often, removing a high spot at the center of the new cut will stop a post from wobbling. Let the post bear on the edges.
Frequent use of the square and pencil is imperative, and becomes habitual after a while. With hand-hewn beams, or a timber with considerable wane on the edge, you may want to run a straightedge along the surface of the beam, and use your square off of the straightedge.
