Friday 18/12/20
This is Ben as he prepares to go off-piste.
In our quest for perfection on these front brace joints we’d already decided to try a different technique. We started the day by drilling and pinning the lower brace joints and then we offered the post and braces up to the wall plate as a single unit.
We then took a measurement from the centre of the post to the nose of the brace joint…
…and transferred this to the wall plate to give us the position of the outer edge of the mortice.
We did this for both posts and all four braces. Ben then cut all the mortices and I did the tenons. When doing the tenons I only cut the shoulders roughly. We then brought things together as far as we could and got everything straight and level with the post at right angles to the wall plate.
We then measured the gap between the wall plate and the shoulder of the post tenon joint (prepared earlier) and…
…transferred this measurement to the roughly cut tenon shoulders.
Everything then came apart and the shoulders were cut precisely to the scribed shoulder. When we came to reassemble, everything fitted perfectly but unfortunately I forgot to take a picture!
We then stored the finished posts and braces, split wall plate at the scarf joint and brought both wall plate pieces in under the tent. We finished the day by bringing in the last two posts – one short one and one long one – so that work can start on them.
Good day.