Nigh Ox Newsletter

October 2001

Students of the Fall Timber Framing class raise the last bent of the Lyster Barn.

2004 Frames

Summer - Abbey North Tool Shed

Fall - Nehring Blacksmith Shop Porch

2003 Frames

Spring - Nehring Blacksmith Shop

Summer - Angelic Acres Barn, Caledonia, IL

2002 Frames

Timber Framing

Raising Barns to Stand Against the Wind

by Dick Roosenberg - Kalamazoo, September 2001

Steve Stier says it was our 14th class of timber framers. It has become quite a tradition to gather eager woodworkers, especially in great fall weather, to chisel out the joinery and assemble the frame of a barn. The project for our September class was a barn for Mike and Cheri Lyster. Mike is a builder who took the class in 2000 and wants a barn for horses and tools just 6 miles southeast of Tillers.

We were nervous about the timbers arriving just as the class began, but with four professional builders/wood workers in the class, we thought we would be able to manage. We also had several other students, including Tial, a pastor from Burma looking for techniques for building country churches. He came with Dave Postma of Hudsonville.

Steve Stier added tool stewardship to the listed goals of the class, slipping it into second place, just behind safety. The class participants seemed not only to appreciate the need to care for the tools, but were thrilled to go to work with their well-honed edges.

As usual, on Tuesday, the second day, Tom Nehil of Nehil-Sivak Engineering joined us to cover important design considerations. He discussed how to build to withstand snow and wind load. That was the morning of September 11. Before the end of the session, news of the World Trade Center crisis had reached into our world. One of the class participants called his work and sent all his employees home for the day because he did not want them to be distracted while on a construction site. As the engineering discussion broke up, we wondered if we should cancel the class. But after watching news for a while, most participants wandered outdoors to where the beams were laid out and began chiseling on mortises that had been marked. It quickly became clear that working together on a community project - one much bigger than any of us could accomplish alone - had a healing affect. Students periodically checked the news and shared it with coworkers.

Everyone continued day after day through Friday with an apparent determination to be part of putting something together in a week when everything seemed to be falling apart. By Friday afternoon we were moving timbers to the Lyster's farm and had a crew there to start pegging beams together as bents.

A traditional Barn Raising requires strength. Steve Stier sees the task as a great group building tool. Indeed, any community that raised barns together was probably much stronger for it. We needed 35 to 40 people to raise the bents with people power. Dick Roosenberg, afraid that the events of the week would keep people at home, asked TR Cagney to bring a hydraulic lift on Saturday morning so we would be able to raise the bents safely if we were understaffed.

Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, on Raising morning car after car from Grand Rapids, Lansing, and around the state drove in with graduates of the class who could not resist the chance to assemble a barn when there was little else they could do for their troubled community. There was no need for hydraulics. Cheri and Mike provided a great lunch and we all thrilled to see the purlin beams of the fourth and last bent towering in the blue sky by 5:30 in the evening.