Thanks very much all, I appreciate the time to post and I am soaking it all in. My preference would be to not scarf for all kinds of reasons we seem to all agree on. I am proposing a sort of middle ground to the clients that I hope will work. I am going to try to shorten the barn a little by flattening the roof and getting approval for some lower headroom upstairs. This will make the posts shorter and with that I am going to ask the sawer to commit to sourcing and sawing as many of the timbers as he can, with the objective of getting half of them. I will then source a few from my own connections as I can, and we'll scarf the rest. My hope is that of the 12 long posts required, only 4 will be scarfed and i will make sure I get paid for them! I probably distribute them evenly along the building, but my intuition says I shouldn't put them on the ends, having them somewhere in the middle 8 posts would make more sense.

On another note, what separation between the anchor beam mortise and the lower tie mortise is typically used? I have seen lots of pics, but no measurements.

Thanks again all,

Brent