A Cherry Cruck Frame part 7: Laying out the cruck

Of course one saves the crucial part of the frame for last, right?

This is what we wanted the result to look like in the end!

The cruck will be visible from the inside and the outside with infill walls.

Well, we cleared the shop, snapped some lines on the floor and brought the planed and sanded cruck blades into the shop the night before.

This is the setup viewed from above at about 10 AM:

The rafter it will meet is laid on the floor, the two blades are set up on top of eachother. The white template is a representation of the rafter on the top surface.

The gunstock template is the stand-in for the posts cut earlier. I’m using the lines on the ground to position the pieces in their relationship in the frame, getting ready to scribe.

Without lasers one has to make do with lots of squares clamps and levels.

You can see that the two pieces are not quite equal. The left one ( or top one) tapers severely, which makes a full miter joint clumsy on the underside.

Because both sides of the cruck will be visible, we had to come up with  a combination half lap and miter. The beginning od which you see here.

Many tools used to chop, knock, pare and carve this half lap on the lower piece.

Not much time to take pictures, or make sure that they are of good quality. But this one shows the miter cut on both pieces. They are then set up again to scribe the half lap of the lower piece onto the upper.

After taking it apart again, it’s revealed that the round shapes will barely kiss when assembled.

A bit of chainsaw and chisel work later…

The upper half lap has been wrested out of the second scarf blade. Twelve year old cherry is much like what I imagine marble to be like.

When the two pieces are back together the result is already stunning.

Even with a little tweaking left and oiling and sanding to happen.

The top still needed to get trimmed, so did the sides where the gunstocks join and a tenon cut un the bottom.

We were there until one thirty in the morning!