Miniature Timberframe

Monday, January 6th, 2014 @ 11:15 pm

miniature, scale, timberframe, tool, wood

As a way in to thinking about scale and inventing environments, I built the thing I’d last built, and knew most how to.  A miniature timberframe.  The fun of it got under my skin in a heartbeat and I was able to zoom through a few weeks, excited about making a fully realistic miniature timberframe structure, mostly the way it wouldn’t been constructed (all the joinery is accurate and real, the braces all have live edges).

Those pegs are all about 3/4″ long by 1/8″ thick. I made each one by hand with a small chisel. My fingers were pretty tired by the end.

As I progressed through the process of making the parts, it became clear that a simple structure wasn’t going to be enough, so I left it incomplete, made piles of materials on bunks, miniature sawhorses, and scattered debris around the worksite.

But of course if this was a real worksite, there needed to be tools!  I delighted in the metal shop, taking old bandsaw blades and grinding them down into tiny handsaws, filing little scraps into chisels and drawknives.  I had to use a Bridgeport to drill the holes for those axes, the regular drill press didn’t had a chuck small enough to hold the right bit.  I even got to do a bit of forging to make the eye for that froe.

I tried to draw-bore the peg holes, but the tolerance was so tiny that I’m not sure it made a difference.  Superglue was needed in a bunch of places where the wood was rotting away (locust rotting, what?)  But otherwise there is no glue holding the thing together, just joinery and the pegs.