Chapter 764: Straight to the Meat

The foundation is only half pushed; it has to be continued!

Starting the crawler tractor and climbing into the cockpit, Wang An continued to push the foundation.

Two houses, a full 400 square meters, plus the large pit for building the ground fire dragon combustion chamber—to tell the truth, this workload is quite large.

Mainly because the speed of digging a foundation with a crawler bulldozer, although much faster than digging a foundation by hand, is actually not that fast.

More than an hour later, the helpers all brought their clean large bowls or small basins and rushed over one after another.

To tell the truth, these people were quite eager in terms of work, and they were also very serious and responsible.

On one hand, it's because eating someone else's food makes you feel short, and on the other hand, it's because people are mutual. You are like this when you help me, so I am like this when I help you; there's no problem.

In short, only a very small number of people would do things like being lazy, and normal people would absolutely not do that.

With everyone back in place, everyone continued to do their own work just like in the morning, and no one was idle.

It's just that the group led by Great Uncle Wang Dashu had 4 people who understood carpentry pulled out to help carpenter Niu Yichen and his son Niu Dalong.

This father and son, along with these four people, were going to carry out a very important job, which was—making frames.

"Making frames" is also called "hitting frames," and the professional term is "making triangular beams."

This thing called a triangular beam,

Locals call it a "large frame."

According to the length of the house span, this thing also comes in large and small sizes.

The long horizontal wood at the bottom of the triangular beam is called a "beam" or "purlin," the diagonal wood on the left and right sides is called a "diagonal beam," and the wood standing vertically in the middle is called a "standing person" or "upright post."

As for the short wood that plays a reinforcing role and keeps the diagonal beam from deforming, they are collectively called "support wood."

Making this triangular beam has a certain technical content. The triangular beams of the early years were all mortise and tenon structures, which were quite troublesome and time-consuming to make.

However, by this era, it was much simpler than before, because the triangular beams of this era only had a very small part of mortise and tenon work.

Most of the mortise and tenon work was replaced by large iron nails.

6-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch, and even 12-inch large iron nails were sold at the supply and marketing cooperative, and Wang An bought quite a few when he went there yesterday.

Just as Wang An was driving the crawler tractor to push the foundation, he was called down again by his father, Comrade Wang Dazhu.

After Wang An got off the vehicle, he asked:

"What's wrong, Dad? What's the matter?"

Wang Dazhu didn't speak either, grabbed Wang An's arm, and walked to the circular saw. Only then did Wang Dazhu say:

"How long should the 'standing person' of the large frame be? Should it be standard or what? Your Uncle Niu is about to cut the material now."

Although triangular beams come in all shapes and sizes, the length of the "standing person" on the triangular beam has its own rules.

According to the standard, it's a 1-meter beam with a 0.25-meter-high "standing person," meaning the height of this "standing person" should be one-fourth the length of the beam.

The reason for this standard is said to be that this angle of triangular roof can avoid lightning. However, it's just said that way; the probability of a brick-and-tile house being struck by lightning is actually quite small. Besides, building such a house isn't very aesthetically pleasing, so this standard is considered a minimum standard.

Wang An wanted to build a house with a span of 10 meters. If he followed this standard, the whole roof would be a bungalow with a slightly pointed top.

If such a house were built, how ugly would it be?

And if you follow the rural feng shui, which is that the height of the side rooms cannot exceed the main room, then if Wang An wants to build a shed or something in the future, it will be affected.

So, Wang An said without hesitation:

"I seem to have forgotten to write it on the blueprint. A 3-meter 'standing person,' the frames for both houses are 3-meter 'standing persons,' and both have 21 large frames."

The number of large frames for a brick-and-tile house is an odd number and will not be an even number.

Because after the walls of the house are built, the first frame placed when putting up the beam is placed in the exact middle of the house, and then the other frames are expanded to both sides in turn.

After Wang An finished speaking, carpenter Niu Yichen said subconsciously:

"21 frames, that's building small frames. Small frames are fine, small frames are light, no need to use lying wood, just nail the laths directly, and the roof won't easily sag."

The small frames that carpenter Niu Yichen mentioned have nothing to do with the size of the frame as a whole; they refer to the thickness of the beam and the diagonal beam.

Normally, although the number of triangular beams used in a house is an odd number, this quantity can be more or less.

If the number of triangular beams is small, you need to use large frames with very thick beams.

And using large frames requires the "lying wood" that Niu Yichen mentioned, which is also called "lying timber." The role of this thing is to be nailed to the diagonal beams of two frames to encrypt the gap between the diagonal beams.

Finally, nail laths on the lying wood, which are wooden boards, and finally cover with thick grass curtains, mud, and tiles.

But the roof covered with large frames, because the lying wood will deform, will appear uneven and wavy after a long time, which is the so-called "sagging."

But if you do it like Wang An, that is, if the number of triangular beams is very dense, these things won't happen.

And the only disadvantage of doing this is that it requires a large amount of wood to make triangular beams.

Although there is plenty of wood in the mountains, if you don't have a chainsaw to fell trees, it's truly not a simple job, and transporting the wood out is also quite difficult.

One must know that when Wang An's family felled trees back then, even if they got a chainsaw and had so many mules and horses pulling together, it took quite a few days to finish.

Hearing carpenter Niu Yichen's words, Wang An handed out cigarettes and said with a chuckle:

"Yeah, there's plenty of wood, so we must build small frames. Sorry for the trouble, Uncle Niu, hehehehe."

After Niu Yichen took the cigarette, he waved his hand and said with a smile:

"What trouble? This is what should be done. I've been doing this for so many years, and your family's food is the hardest. Hahahaha, this work is comfortable!"

Wang An chuckled upon hearing this and said:

"Working definitely requires eating well. On the day of putting up the beam, our family will have stewed meat, the kind without any vegetables, eat as much as you want, hahahaha."

When talking to people in the village, don't talk about empty things, because no one listens. Just go straight to the meat, and there won't be any problems at all.

Hearing Wang An's words, not only did Niu Yichen laugh loudly, but the people nearby who heard it also had their eyes shining, clearly having very strong expectations for the food on the day of putting up the beam.

The five words "eat meat as much as you want" are something many people dream of!

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 765 =====