An important part of what makes old buildings interesting is that you can often see the sags, crooked siding, misaligned windows and gentle bulges. In disassembling and reassembling old frames I have found the joinery to typically be very loose and the dimensions often to vary by an inch or more from one end of the building to the other. Not that the joinery was badly crafted, usually the joints look very good. But, I would say that our forefathers were not using the same standards to build house frames as they used to build furnature.
I take pleasure to see mistakes and repairs in building frames from long ago. Almost every frame has a mismortise or shim somewhere. Timber framing is a human endevor, after all.
I am curious if the Guild has the same standards for tolerances as conventional construction such as one-quarter inch per eight feet for plumbness.
Jim
