Information

Timber framing: is the modern term for the traditional half-timber construction in which timber provides a visible skeletal frame that supports the whole building. Along with other natural building methods, timber frame building has shown renewed popularity in recent years.

Historically the timbers would have been hewn square using a felling axe and finish surfaced with a broad axe. If required, smaller timbers were ripsawn from the hewn baulks using pitsaws or frame saws. Today it is more common for timbers to be band sawn and the timbers may sometimes be machine planed on all four sides.

To deal with the variable sizes and shapes of hewn and sawn timbers the two main historical layout methods used were: scribe carpentry and square rule carpentry. Scribing was used throughout Europe, especially from the 12th to the 19th centuries, and was brought to North America where it was common into the early 19th century. In a scribe frame every timber will only fit in one place so that every timber has to be numbered. Square rule carpentry developed in New England in the 18th century and a feature housed joints in main timbers to allow for interchangeable braces and girts. Today regularized timber can mean that timber framing is treated as joinery especially when cut by large CNC machines.

To finish the walls, the spaces between the timbers were often in filled with wattle-and-daub, brick or rubble, with plastered faces on the exterior and interior which were often “ceiled” with wainscoting for insulation and warmth. This method of infilling the spaces created the half-timbered style, with the timbers of the frame being visible both inside and outside the building.

The use of timber framing in buildings offers various aesthetic and structural benefits, as the timber frame lends itself to open plan designs and allows for complete enclosure in effective insulation for energy efficiency.

The timber frame structure goes up quickly in its modern incarnation. While some modern shops still cut the timbers with hand tools and hand guided power tools, modern computerized numeric control (CNC) machinery has been readily adapted to the task. This eliminates much of the repetitive labor from the process, but still often requires hand-finishing; most notably, the complexity of hip/valley joinery as of yet cannot be duplicated by CNC machinery beyond simple cuts. Additionally, due to the rigid timber requirements of CNC machinery, odd sized, tree trunk, hand hewn, and recycled timbers are usually hand cut even in the machine dominated shops.

One aid in speeding up assembly on site is prefitting the frame, usually in bent or wall sections that are laid out on the shop floor. This can assure a correct fit and with pre-drilling for the pegs it speeds the site process. This pre-fitting in the shop is independent of a machine or hand cut system. Valley and Hip timbers usually are not pre-fit but careful layout and checking can catch most errors.

Quite literally in 2-3 days an average size timber frame home can be erected and within a week to 2 weeks after that the shell of the house is ready for "drying in", which is to say ready for windows, mechanical, and roofing. The shell in this case would be with SIP or Structural Insulated Panels.