Hi David,

I do appreciate your knowledge and enthusiasm, but you really make subjective statements as facts when they are not so, lets be clear about that.

I have on more than one occasion now been corrected by your observation without any validation. I do love your interest and knowledge, in the narrow and refined style you work in, that of Swiss, and a wonderful form it is. However, when it comes to sharing technical knowledge of these other forms, there history, origins and designs, you really need to have gone to those different countries, worked in those different styles and embraced their wood cultures to truly understand and critique them.

We can agree to disagree on the finer points, but I would appreciate a degree of professional recognition on your behalf considering I have been to these regions, do work in these different styles, and have cut and/or facilitated restoration of countless frames over the last 35 years.

It confuses a conversation when you present subjective information as facts based on only academic interpretation, not hands and eyes on experiences with the vast wood cultures that are out there.

1. Very little, (a very small proportion) of oblique bracing works in tension, and those that do, only function at a limited percentage compared to the work they do dynamically in a frame in the way of compression.

2. From an engineering perspective, the buttress brace is often the stronger form within the frame.

3. All oblique bracing, whether balanced or not, subject the joinery at the closest intersection to increased loads do to the fulcrum effect.

4. Learn a few hundred of the oblique bracing methods of Asian orgin, and then cut several hundred of them as active joints in frames, then explain to me their, "set of disadvantages." I would also except documentation in orgin languages explaining the disadvantages as compared to oblique brace methods of framing, they are much fewer in my observation and in the wood cultures I have studied over the decades.