[gbronner]

The author fails to connect the dots:

1) Nails were expensive. Timber framing does not require any nails -- it uses dowels which can be made cheaply with a drawknife.

2) Unlike @simonsarris' wood, most wood available to post and beam constructors was not particularly straight. Post and beam is very tolerant of faults in lumber.

3) With post and beam, you don't need to square all four sides of a beam. You can get away with squaring off one(the external one) plus the spots where any corner braces go. If you are hewing with a broad axe and an adze, this is a huge time saver.

4) In rural post and beam construction, the beams do not all need to be the same size. You can use whatever tree you have lying around, as long as it is big enough. This is an advantage, as you can use a local tree and save the extremely laborious trip to the sawmill

So to summarize, you can have a bunch of low-skill farmers harvesting and preparing trees for beams. Then you need a high-skill carpenter to put the mortises in and assemble the whole thing.

[crazygringo]

Huh?

There are on entire sections on each of these -- 1) how nails fell in price due to steam power manufacturing, and 2-4) how standardized lumber from across the country was available cheaply when local wood was scarce, due to steam power sawmills and railroads.

The whole point is that you don't need local wood, or high-skill anybody at all.

I have no idea how you think the author doesn't "connect the dots".

[aeturnum]

> I have no idea how you think the author doesn't "connect the dots".

You are pointing to a different set of dots than gbronner.

They are talking about the advantages of post-and-beam construction - extremely tolerant of heterogeneous and uneven lumber, can avoid using nails, etc. This article gives the impression that post-and-beam construction needed tons of expensive materials and skilled laborers - but they are saying it's not the case, it just was less amenable to economies of scale. You can't ship in hearty lads to hew logs the way you can ship in boards and nails.

[gbronner]

Balloon framing requires: chop tree -> haul log to sawmill -> cut logs extensively -> haul dimensional timber to warehouse -> haul to customer. That's great if you have a train and good roads, but if you are in the middle of the forest,

chop tree -> hew it on-site -> haul to building area is very cost effective.

If you have infinite wood (remember, clearing land requires removing the trees anyway, and people would often burn them just for the potash), it is both cheaper and better to use post and beam.

[bigmattystyles]

Shouldn't the author have also mentioned cheap drywall? To me that led to worse yet much faster and cheaper construction. It's also so easy to work with that even I learned how to do most things (slowly but well). My expensive bay-area wall feels like a carton box and I think it's because i grew up in a masoned house. (I know masoned buildings are not viable in CA due to earthquakes, but man does my house feel like it could just get blown away by a mild gust here)

[maherbeg]

They actually wrote a whole article on dry-wall and theorizing on what the next iteration of it could look like https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/comparing-process...

[danans]

> Shouldn't the author have also mentioned cheap drywall? To me that led to worse yet much faster and cheaper construction. It's also so easy to work with that even I learned how to do most things (slowly but well). My expensive bay-area wall feels like a carton box and I think it's because i grew up in a masoned house

If it's a production builder built house, it might have 3/8 inch drywall.

1/2 or 5/8 inch drywall makes a big difference to how solid a wall feels but that usually only happens in custom high end builds.

[dmtroyer]

I think balloon framing preceded drywall by quite a long time.

[csours]

They have talked about drywall in a previous post.

[lotsofpulp]

In what ways does drywall make a house worse?