Timberframe bloopers and practical fixes

We notched and stacked hundreds of timbers for over one year before assembling our frame. Occasionally, self-doubt would creep in and I would wonder if we were ever going to get the frame to fit together. Just how many stinking timbers were sitting in the barns, with grievous errors in the joinery... waiting to rear their ugly heads when it came time to raise the frame? The stick-frame carpenter who took the timberframe course with me, and eventually notched more timbers than me (and drank a whole lot more beer than me... every day... while working) claimed that he was going to be on vacation some where far away when I tried to put the frame together. That did not instill much comfort. "Oh well," I would tell myself, "I can always cut the tenons off and put it together with lag bolts if the wooden joinery thing doesn't work out." You must always have a plan B.

Fortunately, there were not many mistakes lurking in that pile of timbers, but it would dishonest not to admit to at least a few. In fact, there was on average, one small mistake in every bent of our house. As we progressed from bent to bent, I found comfort when we located the error in each bent - surely there couldn't be more than one mistake in a bent!

All of the mistakes were minor, none required scrapping any of the timbers, and any visitor in our house today would have a very hard time locating any of the faux paus. One common mistake (I think it happened 4 or 5 times in the frame) was the "misplaced brace mortise mistake." My drawings, I decided, were to blame for this mistake. You see, I would dimension two sides of the mortise with respect to one edge and one end of the timber. Then I would call out the dimensions of the mortise. It was very easy during "layout" (the process copying the drawings to the timbers) to draw the mortise on the wrong side of the dimensioned lines. In fact, the mortise in the picture above was cut on the wrong side of both lines!

I came up with two different fixes for the "misplaced brace mortise mistake." Fix #1, shown in the first picture, was to 1. cut a piece of wood from scrap, 2. plug the errant hole with this piece of wood, 3. sand to fit, 4. cut a new, correct, mortise in the timber. The plug stands out like a sore thumb in the first picture because the wood for the plug was not as seasoned as the wood of the timber. Also, you can see that I took time to cut a plug with matching grain to the timber. The piece of wood in the foreground is the scrap from whence the plug came. Eventually, the two woods (both white oak) achieved the same coloration and it would take a forensics expert to spot this boo boo today. :)

Fix #2., sometimes used in conjunction with or as an alternative to fix #1 was to make a custom brace with an offset tenon. That's what's shown in this picture. As a final note, make sure you know where all of your mistakes are if you're paying to rent a crane. I paid for my crane by the gallon (I own it, it is old, it leaks), so fumbling to fix these mistakes didn't cost as much as it could have.