The conversion rate to produce enough shingles to cover the roof of the OWG woodland cruck barn needed to be established and so a 5.5 ft section of a larch butt log was cut into 4 x 16" rounds.
Each round was weighed averaging 55lbs [25kg] per round.
The bottom round was then halved through the offset pith and then the bigger half was quartered. The bark was removed together with sections of the sap wood to make blanks ready for cleaving into shingles.
This resulted in a coverage of 8ft x 16" or about one quarter of a row (32ft) of shingles for the new cruck barn. The total number of half inch thick shingles made were weighed - 44lbs [20kg] and thus there was a loss of about 20% wastage (including bark) when converting a round into shingles.
There are approximately 50 rows of shingles on each side of the roof making a total of 100 rows of shingles required with each weighing - 44lbs x 3.5 = 154 lbs. Thus the shingles required to cover the whole roof would weigh 154lbs x 100 = 15400lbs ~ 6.9 tons [ 7.0 tonnes]. This weight of shingles would be equivalent to a felled tree weight of 19250lbs [8.7 tonnes] which assuming a density of 0.6 could be expressed as an equivalent volume of 14.5cuM.
It needs to be kept in mind that shingles need to be made from good quality fairly knot free timber and so the standing volume of timber needed might be double that calculated i.e. 30cuM.
And then there is the challenge of splitting out about 5000 shingles. Would anyone like to take on this paid work task ?
Contact Ken Hume OWG
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Larch Shingles