When you want to decorate or carve features into your timbers you want to embellish them! Embellishments in timber structures include, but are not limited to, chamfer details, chamfer stops, pendants, radial reliefs, parallel reliefs, date carvings, and more! Typically, you want to do most of these after the frame has been cut and pre-fit together and you know everything is correct. Embellishments can take a good bit of time to complete so you wouldn’t want to spend a day on a carving only to not be able to use the piece after you miscut a joint later.
Chamfering Rules
Chamfering timbers helps clean up any marred edges. It also helps refine the frame and provides beauty. A common approach is to use a router with a chamfer bit installed. We advise not to run your chamfer all the way the way to the joinery. That would look crude and not be very craftsman like.  Instead, you can stop the router a set distance away from the should of the timber joint, or intersection piece. Using your router base as the measuring instrument can work well. Basically, stop the router when the edge of the base meets the shoulder of the joint. To embellish further we recommend using your chisel to create angular facet stops at the end of each chamfer as shown. Please see the detail for how we approach chamfering.
8×8 Queen Post Pendant
This queen post is part of a timber frame truss with a bottom chord that consists of an (2) 8×10’s with a tie rod arrangement. If you are looking for information on that assembly, look for our Tie Rod joint detail in this library. The focus of this post is more with the shape and geometry of how you could create a pendant embellishment on the bottom of a queen post that has a visible full sectional area above your head in a vaulted roof.
This embellishment detail comes from our 24×42 Wedding Pavilion Plan.
