Don -

My formative years in the trade were surveying, dismantling, moving, repairing, and in most cases re-erecting a half dozen barns. Typology ranged from 1780's German (Pennsylvania) to fairly modern mid to late 1800's in Maryland. Mix in a trip to Ohio for one with massive 24" tall and 12" thick white oak swing beams (with 12x16" gunstocked posts) and another in New Jersey that had clapboards, evenly spaced windows, and slate on the main street side and board and batten and a few odd windows on the private side.

No need to assume that a young designer like myself wouldn't be able to intuit what the old carpenters did as common knowledge. While I currently design - I've cut my teeth moving from studying the old, working by hand, and proceeding on to the design side of things. No need designing things you don't understand... and most of my work is first intuition followed by applying the stats and data.

And 8x8 is not really a common barn size - in my experience it is far more common today in the 'revival' than it would be in traditional barns. Sizes that I've worked with ranged from 6x6, 6x8 to 7x8,9 to 8x10 to 12x16 depending on region and I suspect it had as much to do with what was available to hew as it had to do with 'common knowledge'.



If the model that was handed down from generation to generation works so well - why are we discussing how to repair or stabilize a failure? There must be a series of reasons for the failure...


I'm going to step away now and leave this to the experts, as there clearly must be a precedent for diagnosing repairs over the interwebs and calling out joinery and solutions without serious study of the problem - whether this means running an FEA on a proposed bent design or simply understanding what actually exists before submitting solutions that we might know from our past experience to work...