Sure is a pretty piece of green lumber...

I always thought of hewing as work for a broad axe. But I was thinking in terms of bigger logs. The Dogfather handled that scantling very well, and so did you, Momaw.

Thomas Tusser was an Elizabethan courtier, when he wasn’t running a manor farm. He wrote Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, a book of advice on successful farming. The book is written rhyming quatrains. (I did mention that he was an Elizabethan, didn’t I?) Five Hundred Points became the bible of English manor farming for the next three centuries. Tusser offered this advice on hewing:

Sell bark to the tanner, ere timber ye fell,
Cut low to the ground, else you do not do well.
In breaking save crooked, for mill or for ships,
And ever in hewing save carpenter chips.

I’m sure you will be as relieved as I was, to learn that carpenter chips are made by, not of, carpenters.

Well, thanks. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> We do have a proper broad axe, but if you were packing it into the woods it would probably be a quarter of your entire carry weight. Not exactly portable. We also have a Gransfors carpenter's hatchet, which excels by design at this kind of thing. But the point of the exercise was to use the DF, and it does work pretty well. It would be interesting to see what the DF would be like if it was flat on one side and only ground from the other, like the hewing axe; I hear the Battle Mistress is (or was) sold with that similar profile.

>> Sell bark to the tanner, ere timber ye fell,
I didn't peel this log because I was only playing, but we do save stripped pine bark for mulch. Tip: only run pine bark through a chipper after it is thoroughly dried. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/banghead.gif" alt="" />

>> Cut low to the ground, else you do not do well.
Check.

>> In breaking save crooked, for mill or for ships,
Not applicable this time around.

>> And ever in hewing save carpenter chips.
And I've used the chips from this sort of work as kindling. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Though curls from planing and the drawknife work better, more surface area.

Really nice display of blademanship! Looked like you cut it with a saw. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />

Nice choppin'. Here's the biggest one I've chopped through:

Pretty soon we'll have a Scrapyard Chopoff on our hands here. Presumably scoring is judged on size, and there is a time limit? I mean, you could cut down a redwood with a knife, it'd just take you a while... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I put an addition onto someone’s house once. She wanted the ends of the exposed beams extending past the walls to the barge boards to look chopped. “As though somebody had used an axe on them.”

I did what she asked, but it was embarrassing. I could have used my rig axe to make a nice smooth cut—something that looked like properly dressed timber. Instead I haggled the beams in a most uncraftsmanlike manner. She looked at them and said, “Make them rougher.” Sigh. I was glad to be done with that job.

So are you a timber framer, Implume? I certainly won't claim to be experienced myself. But if you've spent much time in that community, you're well familiar with what a nicely done hewn timber should look like, and I agree that sometimes it's heart breaking what happens in the name of "rusticness" (or is that "rusticity"?). We've got some old timbers that we use as examples of hewing, and people don't believe it was done with an axe until you shine a light at it sideways, to bring out the scalloped shape of each cut.

Back in that day, people were building homes and barns for their grandchildren, and the practical workmanship is astonishing.

When I think of timber framers, I think of loghouses....

I don’t specialize in timber framing, Momaw. I’ve done it on a few buildings. But then I’ve worked many kinds of construction in my time. Residential, commercial, industrial. Anything from building a house to remodeling offices in a skyscraper to steam plants and water tanks. I’m a fourth generation carpenter, which gave me a head start in learning the craft. Not to mention access to a lot of advice when I ran into problems.

Who is the “we” you keep talking about? Do you work for a timber framing outfit?

Cleaning up loose threads...


Glad I could "help" <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />


I'll do it again on camera if there's any doubts. For the low price of 4 installments of 19.95, you too can make high quality end cuts using your favorite outdoors knife. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

(the secret is to take light, fast strokes... let the blade slide down the face into the cut, rather than putting muscle behind it and plowing into the wood unexpectedly)

Slick skills there Momaw.....very deft knife work.