French Scribe Timber Framing – at it’s finest

The last major project of Heartwood Homesteads took my timber framing tools and I to Birmingham, AL for a two month adventure in building the floor framing and roof framing for the second story of a turret addition designed for a very nice home in the Mountain Brook area.  The frame was designed by the one and only Emanuel “Zen Ben” Benatolo of Red Mountain Timber Frames.  I was called in to assist in the cutting and fitting of this ambitious frame.  The first floor frame included a balcony and a little bay window extension.  The largest timber in that frame being a 16’ long 7X7”.  The roof of the turret’s skeleton is stout and densely designed.  It consists of 15 pieces in the horizontal dimension, one king post with 12 morticed faces receiving each of the 12 principle rafters, and 24 common rafters which come together at the peak.   Due to the highly visible placement of the frame directly over an area scheduled to be the new dining room, everything was done to an exacting degree of precision.  We executed the joinery utilizing the traditional “french scribe” technique which involves laying out a full scale ‘drawing’ of the frame on floor, above which goes the pieces to be cut, and plumb lines are used to ‘pick’ reference points up from the floor.  Aside from being a lot of fun, this technique allows for precise joinery when faces of timbers are not exactly square or flat (which is almost always the case).  Although I was not able to stay on the crew for the raising of the frame, in my two months of work with ‘Zen Ben’, we were able to cut all of the pieces and do a dry run assembly on the shop floor.  My photographs here will reflect my absence during installation, yet give a great view of the production aspect.  Fortunately for me, my excuse for missing the raising is definitely valid.  I had to leave for my R&D trip to Mexico!

Our workshop for this job also turned out to be a point of interest.  We rented out a small space in the warehouse used by KMAC Greenworks.  KMAC is a fairly large business involved in Birmingham’s efforts at recycling useful materials.  The Greenworks facility we worked in happened to be the shop devoted to the recycling of various building materials, primarily wood, from across the southeast.  One of their main products is re-sawn heart pine timber salvaged from the framing of various old mills and large industrial buildings.  The antique wood that moves through that warehouse is a rare and valuable resource and a enduring remnant of an epoch of abundant, climax longleaf pine forests in the southeastern US.  It is almost impossible to find pine lumber today with the desirable characteristics of these ancient specimens, and yet, without folks like the guys at KMAC Greenworks, many of these timbers would simply disintegrate in the mouldering old buildings where they now rest.  KMAC has a very large warehouse on the north side of Birmingham where a massive amount of salvaged wood lays in wait to be appropriated for the revolution.  They were kind enough to rent us a space with high ceilings and fairly level floors where we could do our work.  Thanks KMAC Greenworks!  We will definitely be hearing more from them in the bright green future.

More pictures of the raising and the finished product still to come!