Alrighty. We needed columns. There weren’t enough of the originals, and the ones we did have were either too short, splitting apart, or both. What’s a mother to do? We couldn’t afford to buy one new column, and we needed at least two, and we had to re-jigger three more. We were going to have to get resourceful, or get used to walking past screw jacks on the front of the house, forevermore. My wife voted for resourceful. We best start making things.

Why couldn’t we use the original columns? Because for the most part, they weren’t there. There used to be a lot more of them. As the porch slumped, they’d tumble out, and the former denizens would throw them away, or eat them, or whatever people do with all the things I need but can’t find to repair my house. Then, as the roof sagged, they’d pull out whatever columns remained, cut them shorter, and jam them back in the openings. When that didn’t answer, they bought two seven-footish columns and jammed them in there to stop (slow) the bleeding. These were carrying too much weight for their construction, and started to split open at the bottom.

Wood columns aren’t usually solid posts. They’re built like a barrel. A series of staves is glued up in a circle, and then the resulting tube is turned on big lathes to achieve entasis. I know achieving entasis sounds like the clinical description of some bizarre sex act, but it ain’t. I’ll try to explain it by cribbing from Wiki:

In architecture, entasis is the application of a convex curve to a surface for aesthetic purposes. Its best-known use is in certain orders of Classical columns that curve slightly as their diameter is decreased from the bottom upward. It also may serve an engineering function regarding strength.

See, that’s no help. I’ll translate for normal people. Real classical columns sort of bulge part way up, and then taper towards the top. There are many, many rules and ratios for determining entasis. I’m not sure it’s really possible to get entasis right, no matter what you do, but it’s very, very easy to get it wrong. I see lots of very weird columns on new faux-colonial houses, and egad, postmodern houses.

I learned all the column lingo and entasis ratios back in school, and filed it in the back of my head where I can’t get at it easily. But I remembered enough to finish the project. There is nothing on the internet as good as books on my shelf for naming parts of a column (there are a lot, trust me), but this will do if you’re at all interested.

It is fun to yell, “Hey, you don’t know your metope from your triglyph, pal,” as you drive past poorly architraved homes, but you’ll mostly get quizzical looks, especially if you forget to roll the window down first. But all the parts of a column and architrave are basically never on display on anything but Supreme Court buildings and similar dens of iniquity anyway. We only need to get a few barbaric proportions close, and it will look OK. I’m just the barbarian to try.

So my son and I had a jolly old time fixing the big columns. We used Gorilla Glue (polyurethane adhesive) to glue the staves back together at their bottoms. We used a windlass to pull them tight and hold them while they cured. At least that’s what I always thought was the term for tying a rope around something loosely, putting a stick through the rope, and turning the stick to tighten the loop. The internet doesn’t like calling that arrangement a windlass. If you try to look it up, it shows you lots of things that don’t look like what I’m describing, including blousy women who look like they raided Stevie Nicks’ closet, telling me about Dollar Tree life hacks. Hmm. Well, I say it’s a windlass clamp, and dare you to talk me out of it.

Once the column glue cured, we cut framing lumber blocks from the trash pile into the shape of the interior void inside the columns. The interior of the staves is not finished into a curve like the exterior is. It was vaguely hexagonal, or octagonal, I can’t remember now, and I can’t check because there’s a porch roof sitting on it.  Once we got the shape right, we put lots more Gorilla glue on the block and tapped it into the base of the column. Then we drove screws through the outside into the block. We fashioned and inserted blocks at the top of the columns, too. The columns were downright sturdy then. Still too short, though.

So we made a torus for the bottom of the column. We cut rough circles out of scrap lumber on the band saw. To make the rough circle a perfect circle, you clamp a disposable piece of plywood with a small peg driven into it to the platen of the band saw. The peg is located away from the blade at the radius dimension of the circle you’re trying to make. You drill a hole in the block at the radius length, sit the hole on the peg, and spin it through the blade to make a circle. Then you chuck a big roundover bit in the router (if you have a 1-1/2″ thick block, you need a 3/4″ roundover), round over the edge, flip it over, and round over the other edge. See, you’ve made a torus from trash. Before any of you math wizards try to correct me in the comments, it’s an architectural torus, not a mathematical torus, which looks like a donut. Believe me, I worked construction jobs for many years and know exactly what both kinds of donuts look like, and how they taste. The wood ones only taste different if you go to Dunkin’ Donuts early in the morning. In the afternoon, they both taste the same.

I couldn’t make the short columns properly. Or maybe I could, but I’m too lazy. You decide if it sounds better for me to admit I’m incompetent or indolent, and call me that. But I’m not going to cut a zillion little barrel staves with compound bevels and glue it all up while it wiggles in the clamps and then turn it on a lathe I don’t own, because they’re too long for mine. I’m gonna cheat.

I went down in our carhole, you know, the one we just lifted, and found a 6″ x 6″ beam left over from 1901. I also found a 5-1/2″ x 5-1/2″ pressure treated beam that had formerly been used as an ineffective prop down there. Woohoo, free columns! Sorta. I still couldn’t fit them in my lathe, which is plenty big for table legs, but not for porch columns. Here’s where entasis saved my bacon.

The simplest way to figure entasis is to make the first third of a column a straight shaft, and taper the top two-thirds. So we cut the timbers at the 1/3rd mark, and I turned them round on the lathe. Then I chucked the top 2/3rds into the lathe, which just fit, turned it round, and then tapered it from one end to the other. Then we cored a big socket in the two pieces, inserted a piece of wooden closet rod, and glued the whole mess up. We turned the bases of the columns, which include a torus and a scotia and an astragal, and whatnot, out of cut-off pieces of the timbers. We did some fancy measuring to make sure all the components added up to the required gaps between the kneewall and the box beam overhead. We added stylobates at the bottoms made from cut-offs from pressure treated lumber. Aren’t you impressed I called them stylobates, instead of plain old square wood blocks? I thought you would be.

Shingling the curved wall was easy and hard at the same time. I let the kid bang a lot of the nails. On a flat wall, shingling is easy because you tack on a straightedge, sit the shingles on it, and nail them to the sheathing. No can do on a curved wall. So we made a story pole. A story pole is just a stick with measurements marked on it. You lay the story pole on the shingled wall on the right, and mark the bottom of each shingle course on the story pole. Then you can move it around the curve as needed to get the courses to line up. The lad did a pretty good job, I must say, and painted the shingles, too, while I painted the trim and the deck. Here’s what it looked like when it was finished

Not shabby. Or less shabby, anyway.

For a while, the feeling of being part of the process made the porch seem more fun to my son than it had previously. He liked hanging around on it afterwards.

The cat had to commute around the side to get at the rodents now, and wasn’t as enthusiastic.

Well that’s it for the front porch. But oh dear, there used to be a side porch, too, and it rotted away and fell off the house years before we showed up. I guess we’ll have to fix that one, too, with whatever lumber is left over. Stay tuned.

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