Thanks for jumping in with your remarks about now being interesting in riving large planks or pieces of lumber. Maybe we can come up with some responses that will fill that need.
It is very hard to explain how adzing is done it is alot easier to show the technique at least for me. It is also a very dangerous job, (adzing) when tried by someone that has no prior experience. One of the reasons is that you are working in between your feet. I do have some good footage of adzing that I put together for a lad out in Utah a while back and Personally I think that to see is worth a thousand words.
It was neet that you ran across the rough studs manufactured from rived material, those old timers were able to do alot of things with rough material weren't they!, and they didn't need a architect or an engineer to lead them along, just common sense and the need, and help from those gone before them.