Timber Framing 3 - Some Miscellaneous Scantlings

So in the last post I showed how to quickly rough out a mortise using a chain mortiser and also a more common way to rough out and prepare a tenon.  However, the tenon I was working on last time was relatively short (about 9 inches long).  When we scale up the tenon we scale up the tools.    ;)

So the basic idea here is to use a circular saw to create kerfs that will guide a chainsaw on the long cheek cuts of the tenon.  These tenons are about 20" long so the extra setup time required is not really a problem when compared with how much wood can be wasted away relatively quickly. 

Circular Saw midway through a kerf cut.

In the following video the shoulders of the tenon are cut with a 10" Makita circular saw and then the guided chainsaw is used to make the long cheek cuts.  (The glitch in the second cut is a 10 minute gap looking for the breaker we tripped.)

Of course the chainsaw only speeds up the roughing out.  The reality is that I still spend a long time creating a garbage can full of shavings cleaning up tenon cheeks afterwards. 

All cleaned up and ready to test fit. 

All of the joints in the building we're making will be pegged, drilling freehand through a 10" post leaves a pretty good chance that I'd be off by quite a bit by the time I got the other side.  To help make sure that the holes are perpendicular we're using a guide jig which the drill bit is aligned with until it's trajectory is well established.   

Hole Drilling Alignment Jig.

As we're been working through our wood pile we have discovered that we were short on timber for one of our hammer posts.  We require a 6x10 at least 10 feet long.  This was a good excuse to fire up the wood mizer band saw mill.