How to Build Your Own Timber Frame Trusses

Have you ever thought about building yourself your own timber frame roof structure but were intimidated by the design and maybe the process of doing it? Who wouldn't want this on their cabin? Something for your wife, a she shed, a sauna, a dollhouse for your daughter. Now we're going to take you through the process and show you how simple it actually is to build yourself timber frame trusses. Step by step guys. Promise easy. That's a hell of a dollhouse. It's a hell of a dollhouse. Something for you exactly. Perfect. Okay so the first thing that we always do when we're going to make ourselves a set of roof trusses and normally roof trusses you're going to have multiple so we might be making five, six, ten different sets of the exact same thing. So what I always do, always always, is I make a template of what we're going to do. I don't just start out on my good logs. I actually cut ourselves. This is exactly perfect to mimic my six by eight. Okay so what I do is I'm actually laying this out and I'm actually figuring my rafters right here right now of how they're going to be, how they're going to lay, where the mortises are going to be. Now being it's a 12-12 pitch makes this really simple because this is actually going to be a 90 degree cut here and for the bird's mouth over here everything's cut at 45. So it's very simple to make a 12-12 roof and to be perfectly straight, perfectly even. You don't have to have compound angles when you're doing it so everything you cut is going to be straight. This is a 12-12 pitch so that's what we're going to show you how to make and realistically guys we know that our building, so when I'm making my bird's mouth, I'm laying out, I put everything together. This is now perfectly square with one another because that's how a 12-12 pitch roof would work. I know the outside of my building is nine feet so my bird's mouths on the outside need to be exactly nine feet. So actually I've measured everything down. Everything is perfectly symmetrical from where you're coming off the peak. That's how you know that your bird's mouths are actually in the right spot and naturally at the end here I added a two-foot overhang which is always good for a timber frame or a log cabin or anything like that. The bigger the overhang the better it is for any house quite frankly. But here you can see where I've done it here is we're overlapped. The reason I'm overlapped here is this is actually going to be my tenon. This is going to be my mortise piece. So these two boards are not exactly the same so you need to know that. So I know we need to make a certain amount of this, a certain amount of this, join them together and that's really how I do it. So this way I'll have a template throughout my whole project here of exactly how that roof fits together and really from that point on it's nothing more than actually describing what you need. Now you know that your pieces fit and they work. I just take them over to the logs that I have and I'm actually going to fit each one of my pieces. Make sure that I'm looking at my log. I know I have some crappy ends down here. I'm always dropping something bigger. We're using the best piece of the log that we actually can and really the easy part about this is once you get this all lined up it's nothing more than describing which is already what I've done here. That's it. That's all I need to do to get this beam ready. Now I've already, by mistake, we got so far ahead of ourselves that I actually already made the last truss. As we were cutting down on the sawmill we actually started producing these to get the whole house and I totally forgot that I wanted to show you how we were going to make one but here this is exactly the template for this particular guy because I had it the right way. Okay so here's that. Here's that. You can see where I have my mark right here. That's where my tenons are going to go. So this is how my whole system is going to lock together. Real simple. Same as before. I know it's cut the only thing I didn't mark where the bird's mouth goes. So I'll line all those up and we'll cut them all together at once but that's it. So we've actually taken our rough cut cedar. This is a rough cut cedar piece. We'll show you how we do it. Jay actually did a little hand planing on this and you can see the difference of how the wood comes out. It is absolutely beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful and it's light. I like that. I want to say light. We're used to dealing with oak. It's lighter. It's lighter. It's lighter. So really I'm just going to get my big saw make my cuts on what I need to do here. The only other thing that I need to lay out is going to be the tie beam which is actually the beam that's holding the actual rafters together and that's kind of giving you the strength of what you have. Get a square. Do a quick layout Jay. Let's see a layout Dan. So real easy. I know that my tie beam is a 73 inch tie beam. So I'm going to start right here. I know that I'm using four inch tenons. So I'm going to measure over my four inches. Here we go. Boom. That worked out perfect. There's my tab that I'm going to be using for my tie beam. So for me to make a 73 inch tie beam which I need which is the finished. I'm going to do the same exact thing that I just did on that side on this side. So here's my tie beam shoulder. I'm looking for four inches. That's my tab. So this is going to be my tab cut and here's my tab. That's it. A couple quick cuts and we'll be ready to go. So we're actually going to cut the pattern for our blank tie beam. Seemed like it was struggling through that a little bit. I thought cedar. And it's cedar. Same saw. On the back side of that. Now that's the actual way that you should run a saw so that your big end is on the board. I'm sure someone's going to say something. So that's really the shape of what our tie beam is. Now what we got to do is we got to cut for the shoulders. This I'm putting my saw at two inches because that's the depth and then I'm going to have a two inch tenon in there. We need to transfer the marks go around the other side so we can get the other half of the shoulder. Thank you Jason. You're welcome Dan. Very helpful. I try to be. That's what I'm doing. I'm marking so that all my shoulders are going to stay equal. And then I'm checking here off the back side that my cut that we came around and everything is perfectly symmetrical. Which we are. That's the only important part of this piece right here. Loosen you off a little bit. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Bang out the two shoulders. No good? I don't know. Looks like we're off but that could be my but a tiny bit. Just very tiny. Tiny. Tiny. See if I'll fix it. There you go. There we're at. Blinded off. Okay. That's all we got to do for this. Last piece. Not the happy piece. No it's the big saw time. Big saw time. And now we're actually going to be cutting out the tenons. So here I'm going to be marking my two. I'm marking my four. Pencil doesn't let me get right in there. Okay. Last step is we need to gauge the big saw because we are actually cutting four inch tabs. This is the tricky part with a hand saw. With a big hand saw. With a big hand saw. Now I'm going to cut slightly less and then I'm going to finish the cut for my little Japanese saw Jay. Okay I know you love that thing. I do. Nicely done. Right there. There we have it. Could really take a little uh... Where is our little Japanese saw? Right up in there I hope. It is in there. Sometimes you can take... You're still in there a little bit. It doesn't take much to hang it up. No it doesn't. Boom. There you go. Here we go. Tenons. Beautiful. Now realistically you have to take... Everybody's a chisel guy. That's what we're gonna do. I'm sorry I need to sharpen that chisel. I apologize in advance. I got you Jay. Sorry Dan. Let's see how it goes. We're in Cedar today not Oak. So that's all you're gonna do is you're gonna come by. You're gonna clean up the corner where the two saws didn't quite meet because you cut them just underneath. That's really it. Or there's that way. I like that. Or that way. I like that way. That's the most satisfying right there. What's that? Coming in at it at the 90 right there in the corner. Yes it is. This is if you have a little bit bigger you can really square your pockets this way. That's it. There's your tenon. I need to do that on the other side. Clean that up a little bit. The only thing that we also do is we use a one inch reveal right here. So now what this does is actually might hide your mortise pocket when you're making it. So when this mortise pocket is here this is going to cover it almost like a piece of trim. Fortunately this is what we're going to do here. Heavy duty. Now obviously you can hand saw that if you want as well. You could but you like big red. I do like big red Jay and I'm about ready to do a little blue here. All right. So yes you could saw that you could take your Japanese saw and you could go in. That's just really not my style. I'm glad it's not your style because we'd be here a lot longer. We would be here a lot longer. Now I know I need to change this to an inch because we only have an inch of depth. You can just ride straight across and here's where you'll have to finish it off. It's a lot less sawing. It is a lot less sawing. So that's how the tenon is going to look before we sand and then we're going to actually have to shape it to fit our mortise like that. Just like this one. See how this is the finished one right here. That's how it fits into our mortise guide. That's it. We're going to put a little plane on this guy and sand him up and he'll be ready to install. And route the edges. A little routing going on. Plane a little routing. Planning and routing. Planning and routing. No sanding. Planning and routing. Okay so it's time to size off the rafter and get it ready. I think that was oak there my friend. That corner's coming off. Thank goodness. Thank goodness Jay. This is red. This stuff is red. That's it. I mean that's really it on sizing this. So the only thing that we need to do to this side is actually prep to get the mortise hole to accept the tab from the other rafter. So this is pretty simple. Two and four Jay. Two and four. Two and four. Beam's eight inches. I'm going just under eight inches. That's it. This is our mortise. Our five inch, five and a quarter inch mortise. Well now I know what I need to do. So there we go. So we need to just cut the mortise holes in here. Jason's going to run the planer and the router and we're going to get this edged. Get this finished and assemble it. Well that didn't take too long Dan. It didn't take long Jay. All right here we go. Big boy eating. How beautiful Jay. Not bad huh? It's worth that 53 pound machine. Well I got to make up for you playing with big red all the time. I'm gonna go one more pass just to get. That's it and he's just gonna go round and round and clean them up. So you see how quick he was able to clean that off. If you just want to leave it in rough cut form. Okay so if you're using a chain mortiser on the inside pocket of the chain mortiser right down here. I don't know if you can see it but it is actually round. So we actually are cutting our tabs. There's one right there. So we cut our tabs to actually fit this round instead of chiseling that out. If you're going to use a drill chisel and everything's square you won't have to do the next step that we're showing you. But we're just rounding off our tabs to uh accept our chain mortiser pocket with less chiseling. Way different than oak Jay. A little bit different Dan. I love this stuff and it smells good. It does smell good. That's really all it takes instead of actually chiseling out that pocket. We found that to be a little simpler. It's nice when you get the chain mortiser. It is. But if you're drilling you might be going square anyway. Last cuts for the rafters are the bird's mouth where it's actually going to attach to the building. And with this as a 12-12 I told you it's a 45 cut. 45 cut. Pretty simple. Almost every saw will do that. Now it's easier for me to just put every one of them up here and gang rip them all at once. Now you know they're going to be the same. Not digging that chisel. That actually was cutting harder than oak Jay. I was going to say you'd think that was oak. You would. Let's see if we can make it without blowing the circuit. That's what it sounded like. It didn't much like that did it Dan? It didn't. That's surprising. Good god though it uh. It's almost there yeah. We cut them right there. Where's my little Japanese saw? I don't know. I'm almost ashamed to actually hear. I've never even heard that been like that. That was weird. Maybe it's new blade change time. It might be. It wasn't like that last week. You get one of those new long Japanese saws from John's got a couple long Japanese saws. Yeah you see he's selling those things now. I gotta look into those a little bit more. Here we go. Maybe just chisel out that corner. Clean up the bottom. That's not bad at all. No. Very nice actually. I think that cedar's a little wet. That's weird. Look at the grain in there. I mean that's really what you want. Not to cut all the way and just finish the corner. Nice and crisp. It is nice and crisp. I'm not gonna lie. I like chiseling it. I didn't like sawing it. That's a change-up. It is a change-up. There we go. Here's our bird's mouth. It's gonna be a pretty nice sauna. Sauna, cheese head. Yeah well we know where that's going. I know. No sauna for you Jay. All right it's time to start plunging. So I've already got my mark in here. I went in with the chisel and did a mark return mark just to make sure that we don't get blow out. Now I've got a five inch five and a quarter ten inch going in here. So I'm going to go a little bit deeper than five and a quarter which I've already set for the deck depth. And now I'm going to go in and I'm going to pull this thing across. And as you're going to see at some point when I get over here I'm going to have to put a spacer in here because this piece is going to hang over a little bit. But that won't stop me from being able to get all the way through on the cut. So here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Now like I said I'm going to move over and I'm actually going to be really pushing the edge of where this won't want to actually make the beam. So I'm actually going to take this piece of spacer in here. There we go. That sets me up so I keep the pressure over here so I can keep rolling. Keep rolling man. I've got some little secondary marks that I put on there so when I'm on the end of it something I kind of know where I'm going. So I can kind of figure out exactly how we're going to cut through there. So that's going to work for us. Now we can wrap it up. All right so you can see getting a pretty nice clean pocket in there. Come through there. Because of the arc of the mortiser you're going to have a little bit of a lip up here. So what we'll do is just take this down a little bit with a chisel. Come on in here. Dan's going to show you right now what we're talking about. That's the idea. And that's the idea. Oh shoot we have a little splinter in there. Right here. Yep. It's dry cedar. Dry cedar. There we go. That's going to get us there. It is. Okay. So after Jay's got the pocket all mortised out we're marking for our holes before we even pre-assemble here. So I'm really at two and a half, two and a half, five and a half, two and a half. Those are the numbers for me to work with this post. What I do is I'm going to pre-drill everything so that when we do get it assembled we're able to just mark for our bore and be ready to go. I think you had it set Jay. Did I? I did. I forgot to check that. What's that? I forgot to check the depth. I think it's good. Good. There's a hole in everything. I'm glad we don't want any blowouts. So that's it. We're drilling but we're not drilling all the way through. I'll show you down here at the end. You don't put your finger in there when it's moving but see we're not actually punching the hole all the way through. I'm just boring my tip so I know where the center is. Now since this is going to be a finished piece we can actually flip it over and now here's my two marks and here we go. Jay's already ready. Got it set up. Same wood owl bit. Exact same just smaller. I use it to clean up all my holes. Pretty simple. I like it. We were right there. So that way you can actually have a clean hole both sides no blowout. That's really been helpful. It is. We had one blowout and all those pieces we put together so not too bad. That's a good way to go. Not these pieces those are the barn pieces. Yeah the barn pieces sorry. The barn thousand pieces. Different episode different segment. Okay so we're going to get this over here we're going to dry fit this first. Mark for our draw ball pegs and then get our tie beam in place make our last mortise and call this baby good. I like it. There you go just like that. So we're at our first dry fitting and uh this baby is snug. That's what we're looking for. There you go Jay that worked pretty good. That's looking good. Oh yeah. It is tied up here too Jay. It's tied. Come around Vince. That looks nice. It does look nice. I think it needs to just be squeezed a little bit. So here oh the toughy does. Can I get you to hold this tape? Absolutely. And the camera? Absolutely. So here what we're doing is we're checking for the nine foot of exactly where this should be square. I'm set. That's us? I don't know. I think. Pretty square right there. I'm gonna do a measurement check again Jay. Measurement check. Okay so it's actually set right there. So now that we got everything squared with our rafter where we want it to be I turn my bit in reverse because I'm actually marking where I'm actually going to get the center holes from. And this is I'll show you when we take this apart how we draw bore it that'll actually make this joint tighter. So while we're ready to go I've got everything marked for there. Now we're going to place the tie beam in. How's that cedar treating you? The cedar's beautiful Jay. I love it love it love it love it. So here I'm just actually first putting it in. Where does this thing fit perfectly? And that's what I'm looking for. Right there Jay. I like close. I like right on the money too. We like right on the money. This is uh yeah right on the money. So I'm just gonna check right here. Are we square? I'm 50 and five-eighths of an inch. 50 and three-quarter. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Telling me to just move on a little bit. Works for me. So there we go. That's where my tie beam is actually gonna sit. So I'm actually gonna just mark right now where we're gonna have to make the mortise holes. We're gonna take this apart one more time. I'm gonna drill our draw bores. Jay's gonna uh mortise up a couple more pockets. Let's do it. Let's do it Jay. Okay so really right now we've got our marks exactly where we want to be. Let's get our mortises taken care of. Here's the layout. All right. Simple. Same on the other side. So you can either use your mortiser or you could use a drill and a chisel. Whatever the heck you guys want to do. I think I'm gonna use the mortiser. We're using the mortiser. I'm gonna get to it. Okay we pulled uh everything apart where we actually marked for where our peg holes are gonna be. So to draw bore them or to make this tighter, what I do is I take this all. I'm only moving it in. Look at that. The sides of the hole. Now I do know online you can try to find these markers. They're 180 something dollars for these uh offset markers that you get. I found no problem right here and you're always trying to get closer to the shoulder. That's gonna pull when we put the pins in. That's gonna pull that joint tighter and that's uh really how it goes. So I just draw my hills. I'm just trying to go in as square as humanly possible. A little cleanup on that guy. This is really soft compared to the oak Jay. The Albit likes it. The Albit likes it. That's it. So now our holes are actually going to be draw board tight. Tight when we put these in. When we put the pegs in that'll be the last of those pegs. That's it they're not coming out after that. They're not coming out. We'll put some temporaries in now and then we're going to drill. So right now we're going to get set with Jason already took care of all of the mortise holes. I'm going to get our drill holes ready so that we can actually draw board the tide beam together. Almost there. Almost there. What do you think sawdust? Assembly time. Drill rinse and repeat. What's up? It's a drill rinse repeat. We're all good. That's it. Clear out the backsides and we're good to go Jay. Let's put this thing together. All right. Okay we're going to do our first dry fit of the tide beam to see how it fits. You got that Dan? I think I do. It's seated Jay. It's so much better that way. Yep. You got a hold of that? Oh that worked good. Now the point that we actually have our holes drilled we can pin everything together. Except for the board there Jay. So much for just quick pinning it. There we're at. I bet it needs to come in a little bit. So there you can see the seams. You can see where we're starting out from and then what we're going to do is we're actually going to pinch this right now before we mark for our last pins. I can do that Jay. Watch yourself. I know. Tools around. This is a dangerous place. It is a dangerous place. There we go. I heard it. Everything just snapped together. Yes. Yes. So you see how good this joint actually fits right here. It's not even drawn in yet. It's not even drawn in yet. Same. Same. There we go. Just give me a hold Jay. Let's just see if we're in the right spot. See what we got here. We're right on the money. I like the money. I do like the money. So real quick just like we did before. If I could find my little drill. Coming at you. First person drilling. First person to the drilling. Reverse so that you don't dig in too much. Mark your holes. I'm super happy with this fitting. It's very tight. The tighter the fit the stronger your rafters are going to be. That's it. We're going to pull this out. We're going to draw board these last pins and we can try to assemble it again but I bet it's going to be just fine Jay. All right. Get your draw boards in. You will definitely appreciate how well the joints fit together once these suck in. I mean they look good now. Looks really good when they draw in. It does. It's almost like the molecule Jay are actually. They're realigning. They're realigning the molecules Jason. Got no room to do this. Forward now. No reverse. Lucky for that little square Jay. Love that little square. It was a bonus square. Bonus square. Is that like on Hollywood squares when you get a bonus square? Nope. Nope. Nope. That's when you buy one get one free but you pay twice as much for the first thing you actually bought. Well yeah. You love that little square. I do for this. It's perfect. Shocked how well it worked. There it is. That's it. Okay so we're ready to uh we're going to sand off all of our marks. We're going to wax all the joints. Anchor seal all of the fittings right here and uh then we'll reassemble it and then maybe we'll even put a little bit of timber oil on it and see what it looks like. Definitely want to see what that looks like. We're gonna see what that looks like Jay. So there we go. Jay's got everything sanded up and everything. Imperative guys that you wax every one of your joints here so they don't crack on you. We're gonna reassemble. I'm gonna hang it up and I believe we're gonna put a little clear coat of oil on it. We'll see what this seat looks like. Feel like if you guys want to have a Raptors in your house just like this. I'm kind of anxious to see the clear on here. Pretty anxious too Jay. I think it's gonna look great. Look at that. Nice Dan. It's a one man job. One man job. We need one Dan. One Dan job. One Dan job. Let's swing it up. Let's get some oil on it Jay. Let's see if it holds together. Let's see if it does. All right here we go. Let's hope so. Hope so too. Sucks that right in my friend. Gotta go up there or a little wider up here. There you go. All right. Looks pretty good. Didn't really hold. As soon as I put the weight down. I'll stick a little pin in there Jay. Should stay now. There we go. Not really sitting on it. It's only an edge over there. I guess it's really hanging. So just a little bit of timber oil and look what happened. Look at the chains that there is here from just that little bit of oil that's gonna save your wood. Those are beautiful trusses Jay. Those are beautiful Dan. I'm loving it. It looks good. We'll show you when we're done. We're just about done. Okay we are all finished sealed and actually ready to install and we are bringing this up to Ohio to our Dovetail Cabin Build at the Paul Bunyan Show. Now you know nothing in timber framing is truly easy but seriously guys this is a pretty simple way for you to make rafters on anything trusses I think simpler than just two by fours. Looks much better. A lot sturdier. So hopefully this helped you out guys and practice. Have some fun and build yourself a roof for somebody.