Friday into the Shop

This is the kind of stuff you need to get going in the compound world. After a magnificent breakfast heavy on the homemade biscuits and sausage gravy it was off to the shop for some head-scratching. No more classroom for us.

Several different simple tools come immediately in to play, the most important of which is below.

After that, everything else falls into place, we hope. The TFG, via the Apprenticeship Program, is putting some money in to documenting this event, with an eye towards developing a series of training videos and other of the currently fashionable ‘distance learning’ tools.

While we may not exactly how to go about this sort of thing, the guy in this picture sure does. This is Rich K, long time friend of the Guild and all-around patient and good-humored fellow. You may recall our faux newscasts from the Gindler project a few years back. Yep, that Rich.

So a long day in the shop beginning with general befuddlement but rapidly morphing into layout and checking. Joe Miller, Wil Dancey and Simon Gnehm were everywhere offering clarification and encouragement.

This is probably a good time to ask why they are called ‘bastard hips’. These four hip rafters are not only 32′ long and large in section, the hipline is offset and does not exist in the laid out timber. We hear that they get this name because they are so hard to lay out. Hard saying, but it’s clear on the shop floor that we’re not going to waste any of these pieces. The morning revealed several techniques for bringing the theoretical down on to the actual, which is after all, the core lesson.

We’re just not going to let this layout get away from us, especially when in a few spots the hips are fat by 1/8″.

In the parallel universe of old world layout, Simon begins to set out the roof plane intersections on the floor.

While Layout Man man Tom Nehil prepares to become RouterMan Tom Nehil.

VERY long sticks. Best not to mess up.

Router Man Tom Nehil at the end of a long day.

And Simon G returns with the floor laid out, a set of plans, and an efficient presentation as to why you might want to do it this way, instead of relying on those fabulous drawings.

We finished up the day with a fine dinner of home-made pasta and a slide show from Roddy of historic structures in the UK.

It’s a wonderful life.

Princess Sohcahtoa

Carpentry legend has the Princess bringing trigonometry to the builders of North America. Instead of a Princess from the Voyage of Discovery, we got Dr. Joe Miller from the UP, and from the team at FireTower Engineered Timber, long time TFG supporters in education and hilarity; home base for the Beam Busting Team – a topic for another time.

Classroom can be hard going when the temps hit a 100 and the humidity is not far behind. Dr Miller can pull it off, with a selection of slides and models and fast talk, we were walked though the ratios, bounced off the rationales and burrowed into the obsessions of roof carpenters everywhere.

Joe is wise enough to tag-team with Wil Dancey from the day before, and has produced a solid introductory presentation that makes use of both the framing square and an inexpensive hand-held calculator.

The TFG’s Apprenticeship Training Committee is looking to this kind of event for curriculum delivery – heady stuff, but in a room full of motivated scholars, somewhat easier to get your head around than via dry textbook.

More than a few laughs, and about 100 slides later, we finished off the evening with an illustrated presentation on the French Scribe by Boris, one of the Compagnion/Itinerants in attendance. Pretty cool, and the weather’s improving just in time for shop work.

Tomorrow: actual lines on actual wood. Should be interesting.

Oh, the Princess?

A mnemonic device for us to remember the relationships between the sides of right triangles.

SOH for Sine as Opposite over Hypotenuse
CAH for Cosine as Adjacent over Hypotenuse
TOA for Tangent as Opposite over Adjacent

Couldn’t be simpler.

Up and Running

It’s difficult to make classroom work look exciting, but there was significant engagement in the early days of this event.

Will Dancey from Dietrich’s NA delivered an intensive tutorial on their CAD software on day one. The room heated up with laptop exhaust early on, and as the day progressed the questions began to fly.

Dietrich’s has a new website that you can visit, and a long history of loyal support for Guild projects and events. Check them out at DietrichsNA.com

Nicest people you’ll ever meet, with powerful tools that can make all the difference in some circumstances. Of course the goals for this week do not include selling software, but something much broader in terms of the TFG Curriculum. There are several recognized ways to get from concept to complex roof, and high-horsepower software is just one of them.

Wil Dancey is a solid and engaging teacher. Each participant was equipped with a fully-functional but time-limited copy of the software, and provided with ample opportunity to move from the general to the particular. The stick drawing in the picture immediately above was developed more or less automatically through digital wizardry from the electronic model shown above it.

We’ll be the first to admit that computer mastery is not substitute for, and can be nearly useless without, an understanding of the fundamentals of how things shake out ‘when roofs collide’. Hence, this event. The evening ended with a fine meal and a presentation by Roddy of inspiring buildings in the UK.

Tomorrow, Dr. Joe Miller will go back to the framing square and the hand calculator. By Friday we’ll be putting real lines on real timbers. Stay tuned.

On The Ground

It’s impossible to overstate the levels of support and hospitality available at Trillium Dell Timberworks.

The place is really too big to be photographed from the ground, and there’s a wider variety of on-going experimentation going on here than you would see at other shops; truck farming, electricity generation, forestry, alternative fuels, animal husbandry, saw milling, a planer operation, a brewery, kiln, machine shop and lots more.

It’s been so blasted hot out here that the Google Earth pictures of the compound are washed out and parched (no rain for six weeks, and none, we hope, before Monday). So you’ll just have to imagine the spread.

The participants swept in from far and wide, camping in the shade, in the barns and in the big house, where the classroom is setup.

TDTW has a large and energetic staff including a handful of itinerants from the EU and US. Nothing short of turning the entire place over to this workshop would do for TD. We’ve been welcomed, and challenged, and fed all in high style.

The food in particular has been local, and fresh, creative and abundant. We’re wondering if any of these guys will be willing to leave on Sunday. Rick admits that this is just part of his plan for bringing highest qualified folks to the top.

The Guild in general and the Apprenticeship program in particular wants to make sure our gratitude is widely known. If your shop would like to host something along these lines, please get in touch. Likewise, if you are a participant in the Journeyworker/Apprenticeship program, or just considering it at this time, encouragement and tangible financial support are available for program members to attend events like this – the system works!