I have been interested timber framing for ages and i'm ready for my first project. It will be an introduction to the techniques involved but more importantly an introduction to the engineering of timber frames.

To this end I want to build a timber frame press. My friends and I have over the last three years made around 600L of cider. This year I don't just wasn't to do cider but also to pasture some juice so that we can have juice throughout the year. This means that the equipment that we have been using is a little undersized.

The current press is a shop press run by a 20t (20, 000kg) bottle jack and, with the current arrangement we can do about 30L of pomace per pressing. The plan is to build a press capable of handling 200L of pomace in one pressing run by the bottle jack from the existing press. The footprint of the pomace cheese stack will be about 9 times bigger and this will mean that the pressure that the pomace will be subjected to will be about a ninth of what we have previously done. Based on our observations of the existing press I believe (hope) that this will not effect the yeild too much.

I want to hew all the main members (posts, beams, braces) but the alll the bits involved in the press floor and ceiling will be sawn. I have access to reasonable quantities monterey pine and monterey cypress but they can be prone to large numbers of knots (in particular the pine) as they are generally from windbreaks on farms or from around houses. I can also get occasional logs from a range of australian natives but these are harder to source.

Naturally there are a number of members that need to be sized appropriately. The first being the top and bottom beams to contain the load grom the jack.