Timber Framers Guild Forums General General Forum Questions hewing setup

Hi everyone tonight:

Well Timbeal I think that you are in the ballpark on many points that you touch on:

For sure the smaller logs have a tendency to jump around especially say you are producing an 8 by 8--from an 8 foot log there is not much mass there or putting it bluntly weight to restrain it.

Once I did 80 pieces of 8 by 8's 10 feet long for a reconstruction on Fort Henry in Kngston Ontario. They were red cedar logs, and I must say when the last one was done I said that I never wanted to hew cedar again, it is without a doubt one of the worst and most difficult woods to work with.

Railway tie hewing took on many forms depending on what part of the continent that you lived in. In Eastern canada and the US the method to produce ties was to fell the tree, leave it attached to the top, flatten both sides by eye, and then detach it from the top. It was at this point that the ties were then cut from the tree in lengths with crosscut saws.

In big tree country, the large trees were felled, and sections were sawn to length and then the sections were split into segments about the size of railway ties, and hewing axes were put use at this point to true up the dimensions of the segments.

NH