FOH Beams

[Johnsond]

Hi all 

Looking for some opinions on the merits/cons when cutting Douglas fir beams for a timber frame ie free of heart or heart centred, I've been reading up as much as I can as I intend to cut the beams myself. Trees have been down for over a year. just throwing this out there for any advice/knowledge that's about. 

Cheers 

[Squaredy]

2 hours ago, Johnsond said:

Hi all 

Looking for some opinions on the merits/cons when cutting Douglas fir beams for a timber frame ie free of heart or heart centred, I've been reading up as much as I can as I intend to cut the beams myself. Trees have been down for over a year. just throwing this out there for any advice/knowledge that's about. 

Cheers 

If you are mainly concerned with avoiding any cracks appearing exclude the heart.

 

If you are mainly concerned with keeping the beams straight keep the beams as close as possible to the shape of the log.

 

You do not mention how long the beams will be.  Any long beams are likely to end up less than straight.  The design may allow you to correct such errors, but if a curved beam would be a problem I would say if possible keep the beam as close as possible to being just a squared off log.

 

In general people do not worry about heart with this sort of project - Douglas Fir is pretty well behaved and to try to exclude the heart will be very wasteful.

[Johnsond]

3 hours ago, Squaredy said:

If you are mainly concerned with avoiding any cracks appearing exclude the heart.

 

If you are mainly concerned with keeping the beams straight keep the beams as close as possible to the shape of the log.

 

You do not mention how long the beams will be.  Any long beams are likely to end up less than straight.  The design may allow you to correct such errors, but if a curved beam would be a problem I would say if possible keep the beam as close as possible to being just a squared off log.

 

In general people do not worry about heart with this sort of project - Douglas Fir is pretty well behaved and to try to exclude the heart will be very wasteful.

Hi Squaredy

Thanks for the input. That's kind of what I was hoping to hear. A few cracks etc I'm totally fine with The timber itself is a load of oversize stuff cut at 4.8m. There should be no problem getting at least a couple each of the 6x6 and 8x8 beams from  some of the larger pieces,Plus I should have the advantage of having spare beams to choose from if some move to much. Max beam length i need is 4.2m. I've attached a couple of images of something along the lines of what hopefully we will end up with and of the logs themselves.