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Posts from the “Annals of Forensic Carpentry” Category

Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol.2 No.2: Why the stripes?

Posted on 20 August 2013

In the good old days, when fuel was cheap and carpenters were simple, no one cared a whit about insulation and — God forbid! — energy performance.  But now that we’re out of Eden, we need to concern ourselves with more than roof framing and perfectly coped crown.  Thermal performance, rain screens, and indoor air quality are now firmly in the carpenter’s bailiwick, but can be much more abstract than a tight-fitting miter joint.  That’s why I’m always looking for instances where building science reveals itself in glorious, explicit detail.   On a recent morning, I noticed this stripey pattern in the dew on my roof.   (Ignore the leaning chimney — it’s an experiment in non-Euclidean masonry)  Years ago I might have though,…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Building science, Seen

Tagged: building science, closed-cell foam, insulation, roof, Thermal bridging

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Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol. 2, No. 1

Posted on 18 September 2012

Winston, my co-worker, arrived at the job site a few minutes before me, and called because he thought he was in the wrong place.  “I thought we were looking at a rotten porch.  The place I’m looking at is new construction.” The triple-decker condo building in Jamaica Plain was completed in late 2005, but one of the owners called me recently to look at problems with the rear decks.     The first sign of problems was the brown staining on the white ceiling — visible if you look closely at the second floor ceiling above.  Then the client showed me some of the failing deck boards.   and up close:   In one location, they had replaced some of the decking, but the…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry

Tagged: ACQ, CCA, deck building, galvanic corrosion, Musti, pressure-treated lumber

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Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol. 1, No. 2: Prophetic pine

Posted on 26 June 2011

Several years ago I taught a workshop at the Boston Building Materials Coop (now Boston Building Resources) on residential exterior trim work.  I don’t remember all the details of what I said, but I emphasized the importance of using materials that would survive exposure to New England weather without rotting.  The villain of my story was the fast-grown #2 pine that is available cheaply (and temptingly) at many lumber yards along with the uninformed or unscrupulous carpenters who install it.  I claimed that it rarely lasted more than 10 years without succumbing to fungi and other critters. It turned out that I was ruining the day of one of the workshop participants.  Hundreds of feet of the pine in question had been installed on his…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry

Tagged: Boston Building Materials Coop, Boston Building Resources, rot, South Boston, Spanish cedar, Tyvek

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Annals of Forensic Carpentry, Vol. 1, No. 1

Posted on 14 February 2011

The newspapers in New England have been filled with stories of roofs (rooves?) collapsing under their accumulated snow loads this winter; it’s become grimly routine.  So I was somewhat heartened to see a less catastrophic version of the phenomenon in a photo Chris Hosford (one of my architectural collaborators) sent me today:     We’ve gotten used to stories of decks collapsing under the weight of large numbers of drunken party guests, so perhaps the snow did these homeowners a favor. To the forensics, though!  What happened to this little side deck?  As we’ve seen before, carpentry can be (crudely) reduced to a battle between building materials and gravity.  For decks, there are usually two anti-gravitational systems:  the posts which rest on some kind…

Categories: Annals of Forensic Carpentry

Tagged: deck, porch, snow load, structural failure, winter

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