Timber framing

It led me to joinery

[This post is another in a series of musings about how I learned woodworking. It’s somewhat peripheral to a book project I’m working on that I call my “Craft Genealogy” - about the people who taught me woodworking.]

My studies of 17th-century work often draw a line between carpentry (housebuilding) and joinery (making furniture). Some carpenters made furniture, some joiners worked on houses. There’s a strong relationship between the two trades, some of the same tools and techniques - particularly the drawbored mortise and tenon. But the scale is so different...

I often count the beginning of my woodworking career as a chairmaking class I took with Jennie (John) Alexander and Drew Langsner in the summer of 1980. That’s when I, in my mind at least, started to get serious about woodworking. Not in my hands, yet, but in my thoughts. I was reading most anything I came across at that point and one of the earliest books I remember from that period isn’t about furniture making at all - it’s about timber-framing. “The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay'' by Abbott Lowell Cummings. I don’t remember when I got it, but it was very early on. It came out in 1979, I might have got it that year or soon after. 

I lived near the city of Boston and in that same summer of 1980 there was an event on the Boston Common celebrating the 350th anniversary of the English settling the town. It included a festival surrounding the making of a reproduction of the 1637 Jonathan Fairbanks house. I remember seeing hewing, chopping joinery, as well as a series of demonstrations that included a turner working at a pole lathe. I can’t remember if I was there to see the raising. Somewhere here in my files are negatives from that event. Now that I’m looking for them, I can’t find them. The principals in the framing of that Fairbanks house project, so far as I know, were Ed Levin and Rob Tarule. I never met Ed, but years later got to know Rob very well. 

I had heard of Ed Levin when he wrote an article in Fine Woodworking about timber framing - before Taunton Press started Fine Homebuilding. (“Working with Heavy Timbers” in issue #17 Jul/Aug 1979). A misleading title, the article is really about framing - how to cut the joints in addition to working with the large-scale material. Large timbers, mortise and tenon joints, drawboring and then the dramatic “raising” - a large group of people working together to lift these timbers to their upright positions and there’s the skeleton of a building.