Monday 1/3/21
Today we finally got properly underway again on this project. A lot of thought had preceded this restart about how we might fit the green oak hip underneath the softwood one and in particular how the lower joint with the wall plates would work. As you can see from the image below, there is not much space underneath the softwood hip for the green oak hip to land on the wall plate.
Without any modification of the wall plates in the corner, the birdsmouth on the green oak hip would be very weak and the underside of the hip would have come in below the underside of the wall plate.
So we decided we needed some sort of corner brace to provide a platform on which the green oak hip could land. These are my original sketches of how this might work.
When we looked at implementing this, things looked very congested in the corner and with full ‘tenons’ on these corner braces the ‘mortices’ were very close to the shoulder of the wall plate dovetail. So we made a modification ‘on site’ and decided the ‘tenons’ should be tapered.
We started by cutting the braces and then transferred the measurements of the mortices to the wall plates.
We then released the end wall plate to cut the two tapered mortices.
The end result was very pleasing, and will provide a solid landing point for the green oak hip.
We finished the day by cutting a template for this lower hip joint (a long birdsmouth) in our joint template for the green oak hips.
Onwards and upwards.