2006 Western Conference

April 23 Events

Our Conference will wrap up with these presentations.

Presentations

• Ben Brungraber: Key-Laminated Beams.
  These allow builders to build up deeper or wider beams by stacking smaller timbers and using shear-keys and through dowels to generate composite action. This session addresses codes, detailing, realities of shop fabrication, cambering concerns and analyzing shear forces.
• Bruce Lindsay: Complaints Gripes & Claims.
  If you are going to buy lumber, sooner or later, you are going to have problems. How to avoid them, how to minimize them, and what to do when you have them. Proven strategies for purchasing, documentation, and receiving of shipments. Learn a simple 10-step program for dealing with the 6 most common claims fairly and quickly over the phone. How to resolve claims professionally, and not burn bridges in the process.
  Bruce Lindsay is a seasoned lumber professional with over 30 years experience. During his first 10 years Bruce in Tahsis Sawmill as yard worker, machine operator, and lumber grading supervisor then moved into wholesale and retail lumber distribution as shipper /receiver, and truck driver. Along the way Bruce went to the University of British Columbia for BA in Geography and a Teaching Degree. For the last 15 years, as the owner of Evergreen Specialties, Bruce has been involved in selling timbers to quality-seeking architects, contractors, and timber framers.
• Joern Wingender: Creative Timber Frame Design for Difficult Sites and Challenging Floor Plans.
  During this presentation, we will explore timber framing techniques that accommodate unusual building sites and that will take you beyond the great-room-in-a-barn design. Please bring your napkin sketches to start off this interactive presentation.
  Joern Wingender has been a timber framer for 16 years, and graduated as technician for conservation and restoration of historic wooden buildings. Currently he operates the Traditional Timber Framing Company Inc. in Nelson, B.C., where he produces turnkey timber frame homes and restores log cabins and lighthouses.

FEATURED SPEAKER - Ross Laird: Level, Square, and True: The Creative Traditions of Timber Framing

The traditions of timber construction are perhaps more than a hundred thousand – or two hundred thousand – years old. No one knows for sure. But timber construction is vastly older than any culture, religion, or nation. Long before megalithic temples were constructed from limestone and granite, archaic craftspeople were intimately familiar with the strength and workability of wood. And it was timber framing, in particular – more than mud brick or log construction – that first initiated craftspeople into the mysteries of the right angle.

All construction and architecture, from the pyramids of Egypt to the soaring buildings of today, derive from the lessons learned by timber framers eons ago: how to make the work level, and square, and true. Timber framing and human civilization have grown up together, and are interdependent in surprising ways. Timber framing is an exercise in truthfulness.

Join acclaimed author Ross A. Laird as he traces the roots of timber framing in ancient cultures and practices. Learn about the legacy of the oldest wood structures that have long since vanished. Discover the gifts of the timber framers to stone builders thousands of years ago. Dr. Laird, a craftsman in wood and stone and an award-winning scholar, will explore the countless centuries – prior to stone blocks and masonry joints – in which wooden structures of all kinds were crafted in much the same way as they are today: with posts, beams, careful orientation, and a sense of purpose.

Dr. Laird will follow the threads of the ancient history of timber framing and draw them together in our contemporary world. He will demonstrate the ways in which the traditions of timber framing continue to contribute to philosophy, to spirituality, to science, and to the complex web of human progress. Timber framing is more than a trade; it is a reminder, in our current cultures of the disposable and the temporary, of our connection to nature, to human nature, and to a powerful, perhaps sacred, way of life. Learn more about this distinctive heritage, and reclaim it in your own work, in this engaging presentation.

Dr. Laird is a craftsman, poet, teacher, best-selling author, and award-winning scholar. His book Grain of Truth: The Ancient Lessons of Craft examines the relationship between creativity and spirituality in working with wood. He is also the author of A Stone's Throw: The Enduring Nature of Myth, an exploration of the persistence and importance of ancient stories. His newest book, High Life: The Shadow Paths of Addiction, will be published in Fall 2006. Visit www.rosslaird.info for more information.