Timber Framers Guild Forums General General Forum Questions Cruck and scribe workshops, what to study?

All,
The Heartwood cruck frame that Brad shows certainly should have, and probably did get, longitudinal braces. The frame may heve been raised at the end of the course and due to lack of time the braces were added later, along with the wall studs for windows and doors, later. This is one reason why the scribe course follows the cruck course, in case we don't get to all the little bits.

Cruck frame course starts Monday. Will be polishing my tools in the morning.

Hi Dave,

We are looking forward to seeing some digi pics.

I will be particularly interested to discover what mention the course mentors and teachers make about the selection / choice / species of trees and conversion methods to be employed to make the cruck blades and how these choices affect layout and scribing.

Regards

Ken Hune

I've got my batteries charged and an empty memory card.

I've made a slide show of a few the pictures I took of the workshop. It goes too fast, but you can stop it and move forward and back.

Thanks for sharing....

Hi Dave,

Excellent shots of the cruck event. What did you learn that you can share with us ?

For example, can you explain to us why so much material had to be removed from the lower outside of the cruck blades ?

The blade appears to have been positioned and aligned on the inside edge of the sill resulting in the large cruck blade overhang on the outside of the sill ?

Could the post not have been brought down to enter the back of the blade in order to preserve more of the cruck blade ?

Regards

Ken Hume

I have a question on how the cruck blades were sawn? Were the curves on the blades sawn with a bandsaw? It looks like it rained a little.

On the 3rd picture, or so, you can see the two tenons, the post tenon and cruck tenon, it doesn't look like too much of either was compromised. Ken, are you asking Dave why the post doesn't set on top/back side of the cruck and not go all the way to the sill? That is the way my posts land, They don't sit on the sill. Did the instructors give options?

Ken, what do you see as the typical configuration in your part of the world?

Tim

Hi Tim,

Crucks are highly variable in their construction configuration often varying frame to frame in the same building and so there is probably no correct text book way of building a cruck but one can see some methods more often than others. Keep in mind that for example in the whole of Olde Hampshire where I live that there are only about 100 surviving cruck frames and that these are not all by any means complete i.e. in some cases only remnants remain and just possibly most of the less than perfect patterns have disappeared altogether. Another interesting observation is that most of the survivors fall into a date range between 1375 - 1425 with a few exceptions outside this window generally somwhere around 1550 and then nothing. So with some good fortune and good health then potentially all these crucks could all have been built by the same person (don't quote me on that).

One of the clues that can give one a hint that a building might be a cruck frame is the slight step above ground level made on the back of the cruck blade where the post intersects and sits on the back of the blade.

Generally I think that it is the shape of the cruck blades themselves that tend to determine the frame pattern and so I wondered what it was in the case of this workshop that was driving the design ? For example, could the outside edge of the cruck not have be laid up to the outside edge of the sill and then a tenon made at right angles to the long sill to sit in a mortice in the cross sill thereby helping to hold both these components together. Some allowance would need to be made for cross grain versus long grain shinkage. Why are the cruck tenons not proper 4" long tenons pegged to the sill ? - using stub tenons would make it easier to raise but in the longer term will permit this joint to come apart if the sill subsides ?

As you have observed these blades are very regular and it might well be that good straight timbers were profiled to produced curved blades.

What's the answers Dave ?

Regards

Ken Hume

We started with three book-matched pairs of curved timber. The smallest pair used for the tie beam. We hewed some of the work, and used a chainsaw with a base plate to saw some. I will try to remember to ask about the post running to the sill, and not being mortised into the cruck. There is no room in the sill for 4" cruck or post tenons, as there is a mortise underneath them for the end sill.