How to Build a Woodshed
(Page 5 of 8)
August/September 1995
By John Vivian
All this is lost to posterity’s view forever, but you'll know its there and so will someone in the 22nd century who decides to disassemble your masterpiece and take it to a museum devoted to how we used to build with wood.
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If you must floor your shed, set a second 8-foot PT timber out in front — lapping it into the fronts of the side beams — to make a rectangle. To support the flooring, run a third 8-footer down the middle, or (better) lap three 4-footers front to back into the long beams-one down the center and the others evenly spaced to each side. Peg joints.
Floor with 3/4-inch plywood or 2-inch-thick rough-cut oak planks laid across the floor beams (if you can, get the oak direct from a sawmill — you’d pay furniture-stock prices buying oak from most lumber yards). Nail on the plywood with galvanized flooring-underlayment nails (they have a ribbed shank to keep the flooring from pulling out over time). Oak planks can be fastened with flooring nails. Better are old-style hand-cut nails (leave the heads poking up). Pegged floors are fun, but a lot of bother for a shed where they’ll be covered with firewood most of the year. They don’t stay put unless you stove-dry hardwood pegs till they are bone dry, then saw wedge notches into both ends.
With a blind wedge stuck part way into the bottom end (so it will be pushed up into the lower end of the peg as it hits the hole bottom), hammer them deep into tight drill holes, then insert long wedges into the top notch … like you see spreading the end of a hammer handle to “wedge” it securely into the hole in the steel head. Any way it’s made, the floor will last longer if you cap the front edge with a length of hole-drilled strap iron or angle steel at least 3 inches wide. Fasten it with 3-inch lag screws sunk through the flooring and into the underlying front beam.
Didn’t I tell you this shed was designed to last 200 years?
Lintel Frames
Now, fabricate the front and rear lintel frames — upside-down “U”s of two vertical beams connected by a horizontal — the front one at least 6-feet-by-6-inches high and the rear one 5 feet. Diagonal braces at the corners add to both strength and appearance. Lap and peg both the corner and brace-attachment joints. Note in the photos that the kerfs (saw cuts) defining the edges of those open-to-view joints are made carefully and slowly with a thin, fine-toothed hacksaw used to section moldings in a miter box — this so the joints will be very snug.
Set assembled lintel frames at corners of base beams (or floor) and attach with temporary braces so all beams are plumb.
Rafters
Fabricate five identical “upside down V”-shaped rafters from 4-inch square stock. The front beams are 1 foot, 6 inches long and lap joined at about 120 degrees to 5 feet, 6 inches long rear beams.
You should peg the roof joints if no others, as they are open to view. Cut the pegs an inch longer than the joints are wide and use a thin hand-saw to make inch-deep kerfs in each end. Hammer pegs through holes drilled through the middle of each joint, leaving a scant half-inch of peg jutting from each side. Into each end, hammer ¼-inch-thick, inch-wide, 1-and-1/2-inch-long wedges trimmed from the ends of knot-holed and unusable roofing shingles.
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