Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Fake Stacked Corners and First Bit of Cordwood

Fake Stacked Corners
I've been studying cord wood masonry construction for quite some time now. One of the design traits I really like is stacked corners, sometimes also known as Lomax corners - but they take a lot of time to build and require quite a few piece of the 4x4 or 4x6 size. I didn't have enough 4x4s to build the three required corners, and I really wanted to get the roof up soon so I had to forgo the stacked corners - but I still wanted the look of it.

Then along came the idea of the fake stacked corner method. I built a post and beam structure, but I moved the posts inwards by 1 1/2" inches to accommodate attaching 2x4 cutoffs in such a manner as to appear as if they were a stacked corner. I already had a large pile of 2x4 cutoffs I had obtained for free, some were 27-1/2" long, others were 24", so alternating them to create a simple pattern up the wall was easy - and cheap. It also greatly reduced the amount of cordwood needed for the structure. In the end, this method probably took as much time as if I had built regular stacked corners, but it was well suited for the materials I had on hand - and allowed me to get the roof up sooner.

The First Bits of Cordwood
After 2 months of construction I am just starting to lay cordwood. Over the next couple of days I hope to fill in the rest of the south wall and have the east wall in the back of the building tall enough to install the window buck. I also still have a small amount of stone masonry work to do on the outside walls near the forge - and then build up the forge itself of course.

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