Dry Fitting and Drilling your Timber Frame Tutorial Series (14x8 Deck Episode 4)

We're about ready to fit the dry fit the pieces that we cut yesterday before we measure and put the knee braces in. Okay we're on our last step right now of getting the tenon finished for its first dry fit and because we use the Makita mortiser the bottom of this chain here is round so instead of chiseling out the corner of those pockets we cut a relief round in our tenon and just sand, and then I just lightly sand our tenon so everything is smooth, I slightly bevel the edge here it just helps it fit together and that's it it's ready to be wet. I want to lay it down and roll it flat. We're fixing the braces so that when we put this in place it's level for us to slide the tabs in. I got you. I'm gonna swing back. Booming down. Rope down. To you. So we're dry fit and there you go everybody slid in perfect because we've checked all our gauges. The two beams running perfect. Let's grab the level. That's what happens when you check and double check. You're actually good. You're actually perfect now. Perfect. yep yep perfect got it gonna swing down all right we're gonna actually pull this out and just shave it down just a little bit we actually needed to sand it grab the sander okay we're gonna check it again was it gonna go down yeah let me see where we're at we might need to just tap it in we're really good really good lucky we have scraps of wood everywhere for blocks I think the tab the tab might be even the hair we're gonna pull it out again real quick really should not be the issue okay let me uh can you see that new chisel we got I can actually see right here where it's still a little thick and it's not letting me go here and for Christmas I bought this Robert Sorby new chisel here just for this purpose almost like it was sanded I'm gonna do the other side as well very sharp very sharp I'm glad we got that to me oh there we go and this is what we did we jumped the gun and didn't get the pocket clean and any of the debris in the bottom is holding out our tab from setting and there we go when we squeeze this together that's gonna fit perfect okay so now we dry fit the actual frame itself and we've bound it together with a come along to where we know exactly where we want it in place we also strap the bottom make sure that everything is perfectly square so right now Jason's setting over there to drill the pins for the actual beam which has the pocket here I'm gonna mark these couple out so he can come over and do that now since we cut all of our timbers here we actually fit each individual piece and cut to that piece since we might have a slight variation since we're not buying dried planed timber and we use nominal numbers like our eight by eights are eight or seven and seven eighths is what they come out to be once we're finished planing shut this down and then he's going to give this a run right here we're using the smooth ultra smooth cut wood owl bit this one happens to be a little bit older and we plunged a lot of holes with it with this Mephal holder and Nikita drill this is a must for any timber framer your holes just come out perfect every time he's able to purchase all of that whole setup there from timber wolf tools is where we get a lot of our timber framing equipment blades and advice so while he's finishing up those holes I'm going to show you how we fit a knee brace now since we make all of our knee braces here they might be individually slightly different especially when we're routering or routing in the pocket so I take me one of my knee braces over here put it in place where she fits then I'll actually check my measurements 29 and a quarter this one is slightly at 29 and we're actually looking for 29 and an 8 so everything is exactly symmetrical what I do at this point is I trace exactly where my tenon needs to go in because we're marking out for the mortise pocket right now now you need to remember that we're routering in a 3 8 inch deep shoulder so it's imperative that both of these marks move in the 3 8ths before you start your pocket so that your end is tight in there three it's there and that's actually where I'm going to start my square mark to cut our mortise now I already know that these are nine and a half but you need to measure the actual tongue where the whole mortise needs to fit in mark over my nine and a half nine and a half and between here and here is going to be the actual pocket that we're going to mortise now after Jason finishes drilling all the holes and we put temporary pegs in there and mark out the other side we're going to take everything apart again we're going to mark the center for the mortises we're going to mortise the holes and then we're going to drive everything back together using the original peg holes from the beginning okay we have everything marked where we need to put our mortises these are actually the marks I made the other day for where the joists are going to go in now we're going to take this apart one more time we'll do when we're done you see how tight our joints are I'm going to rotate your head okay we're going to make the final mortise cuts in and then we're going to dry fit together everything one more time with the knee braces drill in all of the pegs and she's assembled okay so after we've mortised in all of the knee braces we have now re-dry fit everything as you can see our cuts are perfect everything's pinned because we drilled it on the first time and Jay's already hard at it getting the pegs put into the knee braces now we set everything back up we've tied everything here together so that it stays perfectly square where we want it and that's the whole frame structure of the outside portion of the deck