The word of the expert was "Your beam sections look OK to me, maybe even oversized; a wood frame structure is unlikely to fail at full-section. Its the joints which fail!"

With such counsel in mind, I have encountered the problem of shrink-lifting and progressed to research of spline joinery. In respect of jointing a single beam into a post, I am puzzled by the manner of commonly placing two pegs in a beam, and only one in the post. The latter, well placed centrally for max relish. Two pegs in the beam will make for a stiffer joint, but in view of possible pegged shrinkage-lifting, perhaps this is undesirable; just one good peg in each member could hold the asembly in tension, and a small amount of hinging could keep the beam seated on its post housing?

For such a problem, it wpuld be better to place keys on the outside of the post, but desirable relish might conflict with wall depth. Given that one must work with green timbers, how else to avoid un-seating a beam? Keeping pegs low will bias shrinkage into the upper section, but 1/32" off the base would be as bad as 1/8"; a miss as good (bad!) as a mile.