Heritage Retrofit Carpentry students build timber structure in courtyard

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The courtyard on the Prince of Wales Campus was a hive of activity yesterday. Students from the Heritage Retrofit Carpentry program built a timber frame structure. Timbers are defined as lumber 6 inches or larger (thus, a 6×6 would be the smallest material in the frame) The buildings are designed by an engineer to be assembled with the use of no fasteners such as nails or screws. Instead, the frame is held together with joinery such as dovetails and mortise and tenons. Dowels are used to hold those joints together. The structures are designed so that the individual pieces can be constructed in a controlled environment and all the pieces can be shipped an assembled in another location (much like a large puzzle with labeled pieces). The pine branch at the top of the structure is a result of a “topping out” ceremony where a pine branch is placed at the highest part of the structure as a symbol of luck (for the structure and workers) as well to acknowledge the trees that were sacrificed to produce the structure.