English Green Oak Framed Buildings – Planning, Design and Construction Services
At Oak Carpentry Lancashire, we are happy to work and liaise with your architect and use your drawings where the project is for a larger house or building. For smaller projects, such as garages, porches, outbuildings or stables, you may want to take advantage of our design service. For these kinds of buildings, we produce drawings (by hand) to use as a working illustration and to show detailed measurements.
For most projects, Oak Carpentry Lancashire builds the whole frame on site, as our bespoke pieces do not come as a kit, but as raw sawn green oak beams.
The advantage of this, is it allows you, the client, the opportunity to witness first hand the skill of the carpentry, a rare thing these days. It also gives you the chance to record in photo and video, the action and progress of the build, a nice souvenir to have after the work is completed.
With regards to the ground works, Oak Carpentry Lancashire offers this service as part of the contract, ie slab, stub walls, drains etc. Should you prefer to sub-contract this part of the build, we are willing to accept this arrangement and work with your builder of choice.
At Oak Carpentry Lancashire, we endeavour to produce what we like to think of as a functional ‘work of art’. Our approach is to fully embrace the traditional ways of working with timber, using the same craftmanship to keep the knowledge and skills alive. The carpenters that worked on buildings that are over a hundred years old deserve the respect of carpenters working today that take on renovation and refurbishment projects.
All of our joints are secured in place using green oak handmade tapering pegs which are ‘draw bored’ together using an ancient off-set hole and peg technique. This has proved reliable and steadfast for centuries and still holds true today.
Where deemed affective, we also incorporate simple mouldings and chamfers, also done by hand using an ancient tool called a draw knife. This is a very effective design feature, especially when terminated with a lamb’s tongue stop-end.
It is worth noting that companies offering oak frame manufacture will often use high levels of automation opting for computer aided design and CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machining to cut their frames. The result of this automation can be inaccurate joints as the machinery can only handle very straight, square timber. Frames produced this way will not have the character and features you find in a less automated, hand cut frame. The skills of a carpenter are very different to a CNC machine operator and with experience the carpenter will give you a finely crafted, feature-rich finished frame.