• Timber frame houses can be built with relatively few tools.Timber Framed English Village Cottages image by Chris Lofty from Fotolia.com
  
  Timber framing is a method of house construction that predates the use of dimensioned lumber such as 2-by-4s. Prior to the availability of commercial lumber, builders would create their own beams directly from logs. Large beams with broad spans between them were used for strength and to save the labor that would be necessary to create large numbers of small posts, since everything was ripped or split by hand. Timber frames are still being built today, some with traditional tools and others with power tools.
  
  

Chisels

• Framing chisels are, in a word, huge. Because they are made to work with beams that are sometimes as large as 12 inches square, timber framing chisels can be three or four times larger than an average chisel. They also tend to be very broad, in order to make it easier to flatten large areas. Chisels can be used to clean up the face of a beam, or to finish off the edges of a mortise.
  
  

Mortisers

• The very earliest timber frames had mortises that were simply cut by hand with a chisel. Mortises could also be made by drilling a row of holes with a drill, than squaring them off into a rectangular mortise using a chisel. Both of these methods are very labor intensive. Later timber frames used a specialized tool called a mortiser. This tool is a drill set into a wooden frame that would be clamped onto the beam being mortised, allowing the builder to accurately drill into the beam repeatedly along a straight line, thus creating a mortise. Power tools now exist that do essentially the same job as these early hand mortisers.
  
  

Mallets

• Such large tools can't be very effectively used with hands alone. They need something large and forceful to coax them through the wood. A variety of mallets have been developed over the years that are appropriate to timber framing applications. Relatively small mallets with circular heads are used to tap chisels through wood. Enormous mallets with square heads sometimes made from a piece of beam, often called “persuaders,” are used to tap large and heavy beams into place, and to make other adjustments that would be difficult by hand.
  
  

Chainsaws

• Timber frame builders who are more interested in speed and ease than historical accuracy find many uses for chainsaws. Chainsaws can be used to cut beams to length, to rip them to width when necessary, and even to cut out some mortises, although cutting a mortise with a chainsaw is not recommended for anyone but an expert.