The carpentry of Jay: Arbor

Post 5

The Arbor

This is an older build however I never posted it to any blog. So with that being said with the start of my new carpentry blog I figured why not post it now.

I guess I will start with a bit of a back story. My cousin James was getting married to his wonderful wife Trisha and they wanted a very country feel to their wedding. They decided to have it in their backyard and they needed an arbor. James wanted to build it out of logs so i asked him if I could build it for him. when he agreed I hiked up the mountain and pulled a bunch of ceder logs down and out of the woods with James's brother, my cousin Ryan.

I limbed all the logs and did my best to make sure there was nothing that could possibly catch on anyone's clothes then got to work. I started by making two 2' long cuts on these two pieces I cut out two notches for the legs of the arbor to fit into.

With four 7

' long legs cut I then put together the two sides of the arbor. Sinking 6" ledgerlock screws into the legs from the top down the two sides were very very sturdy.

After putting the two sides together I decided I would much rather put the arbor together with a mortise and tenon construction. testing out the cuts on some scrap pieces first. After the test went good I put the two scrap pieces together to make myself a nifty little ceder wooden mallet which cam in really handy later on banging the arbor pieces together without leaving hammer marks in the wood.

I then got to work on the top of the arbor. I had to take the legs I put together back off to make the cuts and put the top together much easier. I was originally going to go with five sections at 22.5 degrees angles but quickly realized I didn't have enough logs to finish if I did. the 45 degree angles made less of an arching design but still looked really good. This was pretty tricky to get all the holes to line up correctly and I'm sure that if I went with the five sections it would have been much harder.

Then I laid it on its side and reattached the legs back into the notches. I also had to make a couple of cross braces to hold the bottom of the legs in the right positions.

Standing this thing up was a complete pain in the butt. At first I thought a tall arbor would be great the taller the better to make a grand arch for my cousin and his wife to be married under. However at this point with me being 5'9" and the legs alone being 7' tall It was almost impossible to stand this up on my own but after fighting it a bit I got it up.

I looked a slight bit out of place like it was just stuck there for no reason so I wanted to tie it into the yard a bit more. I had a few pallets sitting around so I ripped them apart and made a nice rustic looking fence. Now the arbor looked like part of the yard and was ready for anything.