doing some scratch work on a miniart bldg, just was wondering about timber sizes for floor joists and roof trusses. it's going to be a french country farmhouse built of worked stone, so i don't know if they used what was at hand or if htere were standard timber sizes. I know henk has done some scratching with mini-art... anyone else?

Hi there

In the building trade an old rule of thumb used to be 1" depth for each foot of floor span with 2" wide floor joists at 18" centres (this translates to 25mm depth for each 300mm floor span with 50mm wide timbers at 450mm centres). This is before the age of computer designed stress graded timber flooring.

Since construction techniques would be similar trial and error and proved construction techniques that would be copied from country to country I would think that timber floors would be of similar dimensions with a degree of local give and take (or short cuts to save on timber).

End rest for timber pocketted into brick or stone was approx 6" or 150mm so joists pulled out or fallen out during collapse would leave pockets in the exterior walls.

The way they found out it was too little timber is that the floor sagged, creaked or worse gave way.

I hope this might help.

All the very best

Nige