You need a reference face, a reference edge, and an understanding of how to work around the lack of ideal straightness and flatness. Rough sawn stock in the cabinet and furniture shop gets worked with machinery and/or bench planes and made accurately four square, generally. When I choose to build larger structures with rough sawn material, as in my current project, the joints are accomplished using hand tools. If you use a circular saw to cut the joints, its baseplate will be riding against an irregular surface. The same holds true for a compound miter saw. The saw cuts are straight but the angles can be thrown off.
Marking out with a good square (or Big Al’s Layout Tool) and knife, and sawing my way round a timber gets a very cleanly and squarely cut end to a post or beam.
Sawing the shoulder of a joint and then busting out the waste with a chisel
and paring to the line yields a very fine surface and one that hasn’t been messed up by an errant or burned sawcut from a blade that has twisted or rocked.
The 6” x 6” posts are from cedar that was sawn for me fourteen years ago. They have laid out in the elements the whole time- rain, snow, ice, and sun. Cut into them and they show not one bit of decay or degradation. The only “defects” are the drying checks.
This is a flee market chisel.
It has two owners’ sets of initials. The most recent user before me laid into it pretty hard with a steel hammer, I surmise from the mashed end. I’ll continue the progress until it completely fails, then make a new handle.
The forty-five degree ends of the braces were sawn close to the knife line and then planed.
There is a lot of checking with the square. The tightness of the joints equals what I can get from carefully prepared milled stock.
It’s all in the marking out, sawing, and paring.
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