I am posting a question here at the suggestion of Joel McCarty, whom I had originally pestered. A question about wood shrinkage. Working with dry lumber is a relatively recent innovation, I am told. Older timber frame houses and barns were built of green trees freshly chopped, because it is more workable. The wood shrinks but that's no problem with a medieval wattle-and-daub wall, since you just pack in more mud. Wattle-and-daub has gone out of fashion, however. Nowadays how do you compensate for shrinkage? Why don't tenons flex their pegs to the breaking point, and pull out of the mortises? How do windows stay shimmed? I understand with covered bridges the later 19th Century builders used iron tie bars, bolts, nuts and turnbuckles to keep the timbers tight--but the earlier ones didn't. In particular the beautifully symetrical Town truss which looks like a lattice, was all wooden pegs. And very tight. So I am curious about the strategies you've rediscovered of those experienced carpenters who were your forefathers, to cope with the certainty that a beam would shrink.
