Full Scale Wall Mockup - Rural Studio

This August we traded our lab coats for hammers and built us a wall! With all the excitement of the threaded rod panel performing so well in our small scale infiltration tests, we wanted to make sure the four of us could build a full-scale stable, tight, flush mass timber wall. Still unsure about which lamination style to use, we decided we ought to build both a vertically laminated wall as well as a horizontally laminated wall.

The rough cut lumber proved to be the first hurdle in this wall mock up. We had to sort, cut, plane, and rip down each 2” x 6” x 12’ piece (72 total!) for the wall – not particularly difficult, but definitely dusty. Using a template, the next step was to drill 5 holes in each lamination for the rod to thread through (360 total this time!). Our second hurdle was setting up cribbing on Morisette’s campus which an afternoon and some 2x4s (nominal for once) handily took care of.

On a sweltering afternoon (excellent planning), we started the construction of our vertically laminated wall. Just two hours later, each piece had been threaded on and the wall tightened down. Though extremely aesthetically pleasing standing on its own, the wall was hard to tighten down, and light was shining through a few of the laminations- not ideal for a pod we are trying to make air tight.

The rest of the day was spent disassembling the wall and prepping to build the horizontally laminated wall. We prepped enough wood to make each wall 12’ x 12’, so we essentially flipped the vertically-laminated wall on its side. With the threaded rods standing vertically, we quickly stacked all 72 pieces in a little under two hours. While a little bit faster than the vertically-laminated mockup, the most noticeable difference between the wall mock-ups was tightness. Gravity was on our side with the horizontally laminated wall with the weight of the pieces pressing each-other together from the beginning, so we were able to tighten down the rods to the point that no light was coming through. Success! It was also much easier to flush the interior surface of the wall to the cribbing with the help of our handy-dandy 10 lb sledge. So as much as we love the aesthetic of the vertically-laminated wall, since our project is about rigor and infiltration (for science!), you can catch those horizontally laminated walls in our pods.