A couple of posts ago I introduced you to our beam set, beam 0 was cut out on Monday and revealed some of its inner secrets. At one end the outside of the beam had lots of worm holes and was quite crumbly - it was possible to break off bits of the beam easily and it didn't look very strong. Here's the cross-section after it was cut out:
The light ring around the outside is the soft, crumbly worm-attacked wood that looks so weak from the outside - here it can be seen that the soft part of the wood is a very small part of the overall cross-section of the beam. The rest of the beam is hard as iron and retains the vast majority of its original strength.
The weakest area of a beam is at the end where it joins the wall, this is the other end of this beam where it had been messed around during some previous update or change in the barn and had half its cross-section cut through to accommodate a door lintel. The effect of this was that the core had been exposed to damp and worm attack and its core was very weak - correct decision to take it out.
More on beams in the next post.
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