For some odd reason, I’m a little obsessed with scarf joints. Dunno why. I notice them when I travel and see old structures. I took photos of them at Czocha castle. Anyway, I’ve had it on my bucket list to make some and it has taken up way too much brain time. So I made one to get it out of my system.
It started out cutting down a hackberry tree in the back yard. Lopping off a straight limb and then hatcheting it to reasonable square. From there, I used my japanese plane to make it square and flat. Once I have useable dimensional stock, I then made a template of the joint and drew it on the side of the stock to guide the saw cuts. I may have made the points a bit too sharp as it was a pain to get a chisel in there, so next time, a much lower angle of attack.
If this scarf joint was used for some serious load bearing application, I’d have used a 1:8 ratio of thickness of beam:length of scarf. Since this was a demo I just did 1:2.
