We completed some joinery and started in on the posts.

I cut the joinery for a couple of the sill plates yesterday. Today, Peter and I both worked on finishing up some other sill plates. Below is Peter cleaning up a half-lap joint with his chisel and his cool hornbeam mallet.



Last summer, I salvaged some timbers from a 75-year old local barn that fell down. Somebody else had salvaged most of the best timbers, but I managed to find a few usable ones. This old Douglas Fir beam was not quite an 8x8. It may have been milled undersized or perhaps it had shrunk down to 7.5" on a side as it dried. In any event, we decided to use it as a 10' long sill plate on the PCEI Artist Studio. I like salvaged timbers, and this one has a lot of local history.

Here you can see how we cut away the curved portion of the older sill plate at the joint. It turned out reasonably well, and certainly looks cool:



Its great to see old wood meeting new wood.



We are lacking one 8x8 sill plate timber, since we decided not to use a warped Douglas Fir timber that had been sitting around the shop for a couple years. We'll need to mill a new one soon. We finished three of the sill plates and moved onto posts.

We cut them to length and determined exactly which timbers would be which posts in the studio. We also determined which surfaces of each post would face which directions and labeled everything.

We started cleaning up the timbers using a beam planer and a large belt sander.

Here is Peter cleaning up an Englemann Spruce post, which will be the taller center post on the North side of the studio.



Here is Peter with a belt sander, cleaning up a Larch post.



Here is the Western Larch post after it has been planed and lightly sanded. These timbers clean up very nicely.



We were excited to see what the posts would look like on the sill plates, so we played around with that. It gave a better sense of how large this structure will be and how it will look from the inside.








Next, we will start cutting tenons on the posts. We'll need 2"x2"x2" stub tenons on the bottoms of the posts and larger tenons on the tops. This work is going well!