At Timberpride we believe you can’t beat the combination of the human eye and discretion for reading the wood, the lay of the grain pattern understanding how the oak will behave in the frame. And of course, the least wasteful, pragmatic and honest use.
Oak is an idiosyncratic, quirky, stubborn material and for this simple reason automating the crafting of oak is never as successful as traditional hand skills.
Have you ever noticed how a fresh pair of eyes often sees an elegant solution to a problem you struggle with? Oak framing is no different, we can design you a beautiful home, but the involvement of your architect will inevitably bring other ideas to the layout and flow of life through the house. For this reason, we love to work with other people’s designs, merging our inputs to creates something really special. This is a two-way street with our understanding of oak bringing fresh possibilities, or the designer seeing untapped potential.
There are hundreds of joints used to connect beams in a frame, most of them perfected hundreds of years ago. Most joints work in compression, relying of the shaping of each face to sit tightly against its partner to give rigidity, this process is called scribing. In these joints the pegs simply hold the joints together. Some joints work in tension, here the pegs stop the timbers separating, a hand drawn oak peg can take 1000 kg load for many hundreds of years. Flexing with the seasons in a way that will break a steel bolt in a relative heartbeat.
The forces at work in a structure are now well understood, this was not the case 1000 years ago when some of the most spectacular oak frames were built. Carpenters made structures and joints which transferred loads efficiently with techniques passed down for generations, they knew what worked, but not why.
