Some structural Issues
Some structural Issues
A Beam with No End
Sunday, 7 April 2013
One of the things that we haven’t dealt with in any depth is the barn...which is fully the size of the house again, and built with flint walls and a magnificent roof supported by oak A frames.
Over time these frames have suffered from a lack of maintenance. The most striking example being a lintel crossing the drive through part of the barn, that had completely lost it’s end. It didnt span the gap and as a result of this had dropped somewhat and also crept outwards a few inches.....plus it was no longer supporting the right hand corner of the roof.
On spotting this I put some temporary props in, to stop the downward slide.
Replacing the beam was out of the question....it is 20 feet long. I decided to lap joint a new end on it.
I has a scrap beam which was very solid in parts. I cut a three foot length of it using a chainsaw. Then very trickily had to re position all the temporary supports and beef them up so that I could jack the roof up a bit.
Curiously my little three foot bit of oak weighed about 40 kilos so was quite awkward to get into position. However I managed it. The result you see to the right is not too attractive....but it has locked all back in position for the next 100 years or so!
The slightly naff blue strap is there to keep everything lined up until I have the time to brick the end of the beam in.