Hey folks, New to the forum and this is my first post. I mostly do design work for Traditional Timber Frames in Australia, and we are currently the only framing company here, although there are a few individual framers around. I also am sometimes allowed to play with chisels, and Im building my own place using mostly traditional methods. Which leads to my question below ->

Last year, I took down an old timber frame building which was due for demolition. The frame and building were fine, but the new owners of the land wanted the position for their new McMansion. Our company got called in to tear the place down, and having co-incided with my own house planning, I managed to buy the frame for myself. We are in Australia and this is the first frame ever deconstructed here so we were a bit in the dark. On top of this, the original carpenter seems to have been on his first solo job and there are a lot of odd features and some bad practices. One of the odd things was the use of 16mm (5/8") pegs. We couldnt get these to budge by any method and ended up drilling them out with an auger. Since the frame is softer than the pegs, this resulted in a whole lot of messy holes.

With the frame due to go back up in a couple of weeks time, im trying to figure out how to peg it all back together. My plan is to assemble each bent, ratchet it tight, then drill the old hole through and peg with 3/4" pegs.

Ive tried this on the sill plate and the holes end up sloppier than i'd like, so I glued those home (the whole sill is bolted down as well so theres no structural issue there)

I was thinking of trying the same method but with a slightly smaller diameter drill bit (its hard to experiment, since a 200mm 3/4" timber bit is somewhat pricey)

I also though maybe ill just plug the old holes and drill new 3/4" holes, but once again, the crap carpenter is working against me, as most of the tenons are small and dont have much room for extra holes.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on how this process needs to happen, or maybe just a pointer to somebody who might be able to help out?

TIA