Thread: A Japanese timber framed garden shed

Those big sash clamps look familiar. I kind of want to say De-Sta-Co, the old Detroit Stamping Company, but they look kind of 1930’s or earlier.

On edit…Hargraves or Hargreves I think. Maybe Cincinnati Tool Company? I think we had those in grade 9 shop class in 1967 come to think on it.

Very good! The long ones with notches on the narrow faces of the bar are Cincinnati Tool Co. The ones with ridges on the sides for side clutches are Hargraves. Both probably early 20th century. There are also some modern Jorgensen pipe clamps and a few older no-name/unidentified pipe clamps. The g-clamps (we call them c clamps here) are various USA makers.

I'll add my best effort to the guessing game that the Pinot Noir was Willimete Valley 2019.

A few years ago I stayed in a delightful Japanese Style AirBNB in Portland near Mississippi Ave. The owner was away that week, apparently conducting a course on Japanese building. Are Japanese builds a big thing in the area?

Originally Posted by Fuzzie

I'll add my best effort to the guessing game that the Pinot Noir was Willimete Valley 2019.

A few years ago I stayed in a delightful Japanese Style AirBNB in Portland near Mississippi Ave. The owner was away that week, apparently conducting a course on Japanese building. Are Japanese builds a big thing in the area?

Brilliant guess! It was in fact a Treos 2013 Pinot Noir. The Treos vineyards are about 30 minute drive down the valley in the Eola/Amity Hills wine district. Local wine for the local spirits.
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Japanese house aren't common anywhere in the US but you are most likely to find them on the West Coast. Portland and Seattle have always had fairly large Japanese communities, as well as the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles. There is enough interest to support a few well known builders who specialize. East Wind/Higashi Kaze in California is probably the best known. Takumi, in Seattle, is another, and there are a handful more. The owner of Takumi also teaches Japanese carpentry and is generously advising me on my shed build. There are probably more people who like them than can afford them. It is a costly way to build for sure. Which is why I am doing a very small shed.

Getting back to the shed.

A little terminology translation since I'm in the USA. You know, Australia and the USA: two countries separated by a common language.

Where I'm from, "timber framed," means a structure made of large dimensioned vertical posts and horizontal beams that are connected by wood joinery like mortise/mortice and tenons and dovetails and such. Large dimensioned wood structures joined with metal connectors rather than wood only joinery here are called "post and beam" buildings. The metal connectors rather than all wood joinery are the difference. Other buildings framed with wood of smaller dimensions that are connected by nails and screws are generally called "stick built." Are these distinctions made in Australia or are there others?

My shed is an example of what I consider a "timber framed" structure. In Japan I think this was just traditional building before WWII but with advances in engineering and earthquake resistance building codes there have added more Western framing methods such as diagonal bracing and more metal connectors. Especially for joinery that is in tension. Where I live, my shed is so small in plan and elevation and not a residence that it is not regulated by local building codes.

I'm not recommending anyone anywhere build this way. I'm only showing what and how and why I'm doing it. I'd love questions and advice to keep me from mistakes and encouragement to get me past the hard yards.

I cannot speak to the distinctions in heavy timber construction…most of those buildings I have seen also have some kind of iron joint reinforcement and or iron tension rods in the roof support structure. I haven’t seen a new build like that in the 32 years I have been down here.

“Stick built” here means a lightweight stud frame built on site. More and more pre-fab frames are delivered and stood in a day. No one stick frames roofs anymore, they are all pre fab engineered trusses made from 2 x 4 and nail plates.

I spy an Italian coffee lover. I see there's a coffee grinder in the back room to the left of the Trinacria flag.
Are you using Japanese chisels or any other Japanese tools for the shed construction?

Very sharp eye. In fact, here I am right now

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I keep the grinder in the garage so the noise doesn't wake my later-rising wife.

Yes to using Japanese tools, mostly. Layout tools, saws, chisels, and planes. I'll show some of them along the way.

Back to shed building. One technique I learned early in my research for this build was to saw a sewari, a back or relief cut, on one face of the freshly cut heart center beam. The idea is to concentrate all the tangential contraction as the beam dries to one face and reduce or eliminate surface checking on the other three faces. In my reading about Western timber sawing I've never seen this approach mentioned. It seems like a good idea.

Sometimes wedges are tapped into the kerf every 30-40 cm or so and periodically tapped in further to keep pressure on the sides as the beam shrinks. Here are some of the beams ends just after kerfing.
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I did some beams with and some without wedges. Adding wedges makes it harder to stack the beams as they dry and it is a pain to unstack and re-tap the wedges and restack several times over months of drying. On some beams the sewari seemed to work beautifully. On others maybe not. But my sample is only 18 beams. Overall I'd say it worked well because I did get some checking on the other faces on most beams but they are narrow.

Here is one end a year later. You can see the kerf has expanded and there no checks on the other three faces, at least at this end.

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And another couple of sticks showing one side with no checks, and another beam with the expanded relief kerf.

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In Japan the kerfed face is typically buried in a wall if it is in a post or faced up or down out of view if it is horizontal. Or it can be filled with a wedged strip if being visible is unavoidable. Structurally it doesn't matter whether it is filled or not unless the kerf runs through a tenon. Planning which face to kerf takes some thought and experience. I tried to decide ahead of time which post and which beam would go where and which face would best be hidden. In Japan that job goes to the head carpenter. No head carpenter here. Just little old me. I mostly did OK but wish I could have had a couple of those cuts back.

I tried filling some of the kerfs as an experiment even though I knew those surfaces would be hidden. I will fill the remaining kerfs on the timbers that will be exposed to the outside elements where they might accumulate water or otherwise be unsightly. You can see a couple of filled kerfs here.
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Sometimes filling them looked better. Sometimes worse. Just one more thing to think about. I hand planed the filler strips using one of the beams as a planing bench. It wasn't that hard to do the planing, but the variable width of the dried saw kerfs made getting a tight fit tricky and left some gaps here and there.

For scale, most of the beams in the pix are very roughly 125 x 125 mm.

This is proving to be one of the most interesting threads I have seen. A whole different approach to working with timber.
Looking forward to this ongoing build.

I agree Ray,
Thanks for taking us along Gary. I've watched temple builders working in Japan. It was fascinating. This is just as good ...nearly

Fascinating Gary, really interesting.

Originally Posted by GRadice

I tried filling some of the kerfs as an experiment even though I knew those surfaces would be hidden. I will fill the remaining kerfs on the timbers that will be exposed to the outside elements where they might accumulate water or otherwise be unsightly.

If I'm faced with "it's looks like I'm trying to hide it, and it's not hidden...just accented" then I'll usually go the other way and make it a contrast. So e.g. in this case it may look ok with a dark filler - charcoal grey or similar. Hard to envisage though, without knowing where the beams will be placed.

Yes, highlighting the kerf is another way to go. A version of that I've seen in pictures is to plane the filler strip nearly flush but leave it proud about 5 mm to create a nice shadow line. It looks a little like an added piece of architectural moulding.


Another Japanese practice is to orient posts so that the root end of the original tree is down and the crown end is up. They do the same with vertical board and batten siding: the boards are oriented as the tree would have grown. It isn't always obvious in a sawn board which end is which. Sometimes one can suss it out from the grain pattern, sometimes by the ratio of sapwood to heartwood along the length. Neither of those methods was useful for my stock. What was useful was examining the pattern of growth rings around the knots. Here is one. The growth rings on the upper, crown direction are closer together than those on the lower, root side of the branch. Sometimes I found it was a close call and that I needed to look at several knots to be confident.


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This is one of those subtle features that I've never noticed before but now that I've seen it I can't not see it.

I have read that for boards laid horizontally the preferred aesthetic is to place the root end to your left as seen when you are facing the entrance to a building or a room.

Yeah thanks for that Gary. Now I am going to be haunted all day about what a hack woodworker I am.

I used to go to Japan 3 or 4 times a month and eventually learned that there is always an unseen level of refinement to things. My wife and I are gradually building a Japanese garden adjacent to the house. It has taken me six years to build the house…I think the garden will take twice that long to understand and improve.