Timber Frame Hand Rails (Part II)

Here are pictures of the finished 3rd floor timber frame hand rail. This first picture was taken from the stairwell, and the eyebrow dormer can be seen to the right.

My wife applied three or four coats of oil based polyurethane before I installed the black iron balusters. I discovered this style of baluster at Lowes several months ago and bought enough of them to do the 2nd floor hand rail. Because we needed several of these balusters throughout the house (we plan to use them in the stairwell), we searched on line and found them cheaper. We gave the local Lowes a chance to price match, but the manager on duty declined. So we ordered them online, and to our great surprise, the online balusters were solid iron, whereas the ones from Lowes had been hollow. I'm glad they didn't price match after all! (Too bad both brands are made in China - I would have spent more for some made in the USA if we could have found them.)

This second picture was taken from the 3rd floor tower. The arched braces in the foreground are curly maple, and the floor in the background is hickory. In the far background is our stucco chimney and a hammer beam truss.

I took this third picture to show off the 3/4" pegs in the post. I made the pegs by whittling down some leftover 1" pegs. I thought the 1" pegs were too big in proportion to this 6x6 post.

Timber Frame Hand Rails (Part I)

On the list of "critical path items" before we move into our timber frame house is "finish the hand rails." I decided to use mortise and tenon joinery with pegged joints so that the handrails would match the timberframe aesthetic. My witty friend calls this "gothick architecture."

I found a 3 year old white oak 6x6 and a 3 year old white oak 3x6 laying outside next to my sawmill. Although the beams were gray and weathered, after a few passes with my beam planer, they looked almost brand new. Natural resistance to decay is one of white oak's wonderful attributes. The first picture shows an interesting ring pattern in this timber. By the way, it's best to use heart-centered timbers like this when timberframing, otherwise the beams are more likely to bow when they dry.

Before cutting the joinery, I added a pendant shape to the top of this post. Pendants and other little features like reveals and grooves are often easier to add to posts and beams than the joinery itself. (so why not add them?!) In this instance, I simply set the skill-saw on a 45 degree angle and cut through some lines I had drawn on the timber. I then used a sharp framing chisel to shave off enough thin slivers of wood to hide the scorch marks from the saw.

After adding the fru-fru stuff, I moved on to the joinery. Less than 25% of the joints in my house frame are "housed," but I'll readily admit that a housed joint looks best. In addition to adding strength to most joints, a proper housing obscures any gaps that might otherwise show over time where one shrinking timber meets another. Because the hand rail will receive a lot of close-up scrutiny, I took the extra time to implement housed joints here.

After drawing my layout lines, I used my Makita chain mortiser to rough out the 4 1/2" deep tenon. I then cut a shallow line around the housing with the skill saw and used a chisel to notch it out. A housed joint does not require any extra work on the tenon, but it is important to carefully test fit the mortise and tenon together and make sure that the tenon does indeed seat all the way into the housing and mortise. While my joint was temporarily together, I drew a pencil line on the hand rail, so that when I disassembled the two pices of wood, I could tell how far the tenon had gone into the mortise. Some adjustment was necessary, so I repeated this process of "test assemble-scribe-disassemble-chisel" a couple of times.

After I finished the two handrails and the corner post in the basement, I carried them up 43 stairs to the 3rd floor. Whew, light weight is not among white oak's wonderful attributes.

Cutting a mortise into the 26 foot poplar post in the middle of our timberframe was a more sober task. Messing up was not an option! And although poplar is a lot easier to chisel than white oak, I was not able to use my chain mortiser to speed up the process. Instead, I used an auger and a drill to hog out most of the mortise, and then squared the corners with my framing chisel. I also carefully cut a square hole in the finished hickory floor to receive the bottom of the post.

The last picture shows the first test fitting. Success. (Back down 43 stairs with the white oak pieces, sand, and climb back up 43 stairs.)

Incidentally, some timberframe purists eschew the use of modern power tools. I doubt many of them work with a wood as hard and durable as white oak! And in my defense, I would like to point out that not a single lump of coal was burned, nor was a milligram of uranium depleted in the construction of this hand rail. All of the power tools utilized here were operated with solar power from our off grid power system. Whilst at least 40 pounds of carbon is sequestered in this hand rail. :)

In part II of this posting, I'll show the completed handrail, finished with polyurethane, with black iron balusters installed.

A Windy Tale

Last weekend, our daughter's softball game was interrupted due to a tornado warning. Rather than book it back to our mobile home, we decided to weather this one out at our house site. Our brick pizza oven was still warm from the night before, so we heated up leftovers and listened to the radio for weather updates.

In spite of strong winds and driving rain, things were calm and cozy inside our timberframe. Our peace and quiet was interrupted though when giant hail started slamming the steel garage doors on the north side of our house. We soon retreated to the basement !

While studying a clumpy ball of hail about the size of my fist (and pondering the condition of our solar panels), I watched a 100 plus foot oak tree slam into the stone pile in our front yard. Four more trees of that size fell within seconds, but I didn't get to see them, because I was herding our family away from the windows and into the storm room that adjoins our basement.

Torrential rain accompanied the winds, such that all of the runoff from the roof (we don't have gutters yet) was blown against the house walls and ran down behind the unfinished stonework and into the basement. When the greatest danger passed, we emerged from the storm room to place buckets where water was running past the sill plate. And as soon as the rain subsided we walked upstairs and looked out our windows to find 80 to 100 year old oak trees laying in our front yard and across our driveway.

Fortunately, the tree damage was limited to the vicinity of our house -- very few trees fell elsewhere on our farm this time. Still though, the uprooted trees were eerily reminiscent of those that came down in the 2003 ice storm and supplied all of the timbers for our house. By comparison, this week's storm was insignificant... providing only 17 loader buckets of firewood and 12 large logs (for our porch timbers perhaps?).

We were lucky that no trees hit the house, because I now realize that some of the remaining standing trees are within range of the house if they were to fall. I believe I'll do some heavy pruning when I get caught up on some of my other projects. I have no desire to splice a timber frame back together or repair a slate roof. (Incidentally, the solar panels were just fine - the somewhat slushy hail came from the north whereas the panels face south.)

Buttoning up the radiant heat floors...

It's brutally hot and humid here in Kentucky now, which makes it an odd time to be discussing radiant heat, but I'd like to describe the final details of our radiant floors as we implement them.

I fired up the system this past winter and it worked great for heating the house and keeping our feet warm. In fact, the home-made aluminum transfer plates (10 to 15 cents apiece thank you!) were so effective that when we walked on the floors, we could feel exactly where the plates were located. But because we hadn't installed our ceilings yet, we had a lot of misdirected heat. The radiant tubing in the first floor inadvertently heated the basement, and the radiant tubing in the second floor made for hot heads on the first level of the house (with heat coming from the ceiling, it felt like talking on a 1990's cell phone for 2 hours). Before installing our finish ceilings, I took precautions to ensure that very little of our heat gets misdirected in our finished house.

The photograph shows what's above the ceilings in our timberframe house. To the left, you can see the PEX tubing affixed to the subfloor with aluminum transfer plates. The tubing runs left to right (and vice versa) in the picture, between 3x3 oak floor joists. The floor joists and the tubing are on one foot centers. (I used 3x3's instead of 2x4's, because I cut them on my own saw mill and this gave me two chances to saw the 3" dimension without bow or taper.)

In the middle of the photograph, you can see a layer of heavy aluminum foil stapled beneath the floor joists, but above the tongue and groove ceilings. This foil is made specifically for reflecting radiant heat and can be bought on the internet or at a box store. (We found ours at Lowes.) Even though a lot of web sites say that kitchen aluminum foil won't work, I'd bet that it would work. But the purpose-built stuff is better if for no other reason than it has "scrim" or fiber embedded in it and therefore does not tear easily. Because I was working alone, I used a few ceiling boards to hold up the aluminum foil while I was stapling it up.

In the right of the picture, you can see the (tulip) poplar tongue and groove ceilings installed beneath the aluminum foil. The ends of the boards merely sit on top of the timber frame beams. I avoided nailing any of them, so if at any time I want to remove the ceiling boards (to reroute electrical wiring or to repair radiant floors), I can simply slide the tongue and groove boards back out of the way. (FWIW, the poplar boards don't actually look bone white like the picture - they have a green hue which mellows to a nice buttery brown color in a few weeks.)

Well, that's it. Rinse and repeat. I have roughly half of a mile of tongue and groove boards to cut and install before I'm finished. I always try to dig deep and "be my own Mexican," but I think I'm going to try and get some family or neighborly help to finish this job.

Geothermal - Part 3 (Concentric Fitting for Domestic Hot Water)

Most Geothermal heat pumps available today have the option of providing free hot water in the summer time. Although it sounds too good to be true, it really does work. Here's how: A geothermal heat pump cools your house in the summer by removing "heat" from the inside air and transferring that heat to the ground outside. Instead of transferring all of this excess heat to the ground, the heat pump can transfer some of this waste heat (about 10%) to your hot water heater. The only extra energy required to get this free heat is the electricity required to run a small pump (50 watts) to circulate water from your heat pump to the hot water tank. In this picture of one of our heat pumps, you can see four insulated lines - two large ones are for the underground loop and two small ones are for the hot water tank.

The system works best if you are willing to install two hot water tanks - one heated exclusively by the heat pump, and one heated by conventional means (gas or electric) for periods of high demand when your heat pump does not provide enough free hot water. In actuality, most installations probably use only one hot water tank for both purposes, with admirable, but not optimal, results.

Like everything else in our house, our hot water supply is set up a little bit differently. We have something called an indirect hot water heater, connected to our wood boiler. In the winter, the wood boiler heats the domestic water in this stainless steel tank via an integral heat exchanger. In the summer, the water will be heated by the heat pump. Downstream of the indirect hot water heater will be an on-demand heater to provide hot water in the spring, fall, and during periods of high demand. Typical hot water tanks have three ports on them... "cold in" "hot out" and "drain". So typical geothermal heat pump installations take advantage of the drain port to inject the "free" hot water into the tank. Our indirect hot water tank has no such 3rd port, so our installation required something custom-built. It's called a concentric fitting. (aka radial fitting)

The purpose of the fitting is to allow water to flow "in to" and "out of" the same port of the hot water tank. In fact, this was the original installation method employed by Water Furnace several years ago, until they came up with a more reliable method of using the drain port. I searched the internet for concentric or radial fittings, but came up empty handed, so I set out to build my own. I thought I'd post the pictures of it here in case anyone else needs to build their own some day. It turned out to be relatively simple. The ports on our hot water tank are 1" ports instead of the typical 3/4" ports, so my fitting will hopefully be more reliable than the original water furnace fittings, which (I'm told) had a tendency to clog up with mineral deposits.

The pictures should be self explanatory to anyone with the modest plumbing skills required to replicate one of these fittings. If not, post a question here and I'll answer questions if I am able.

Compass Rose - (Part 2 of 2)

This is a continuation, more or less, of a much earlier entry entitled Compass Rose.

Last week we rented the floor sanding equipment again and finished the rest of our hardwood floors. It was a marathon floor finishing session, during which we applied 13.5 gallons of oil based polyurethane. I've decided that oil based polyurethane smells like bad tequila, with a hangover to match, but I'm convinced it's better than water-based polyurethane, if for no other reason than the fact that they're outlawing the oil based stuff in several states now. (due to the VOC's?) It does give the wood a nice amber glow that I don't see in water based finishes.

Here's a second picture of the compass rosette, without the reflections from the window. The wood species are: white oak, cherry, walnut, and hard maple.

Very soon, before the sanding process is nothing but a distant memory for me, I'll post what we learned about the various types of floor sanders. We used three different walk-behind types, and two different edging sanders in the course of finishing approximately 3500 square feet of floors.

Just for kicks, here's a picture of this same floor, almost three years ago when we were raising the frame. This picture might give you a panoramic sense of the view from this room, as it's impossible to convey this now with a camera by photographing through glass.

Because I've witnessed two spontaneous combustion events at my own house site, I feel obliged to include this floor-finishing reminder... ALWAYS dispose of oily rags and sanding dust in a metal container far away from anything flammable or of value. Last week I made a checklist of the disposition of anything combustible that I reviewed and initialed at the end of every work day.