I'm currently designing a timber-framed shed for the side of
the house using Cecil A. Hewett's "English Historic Carpentry"
(ISBN 0-941936-41-4) as a reference.

Off-hand I'd say I'll be needing at least a couple hundred
treenails.  Is there some trick to producing these in a timely
fashion, or does one have to hack them out one at a time using
a hatchet ?  Hewing each one by hand could easily amount to
the most time-consuming operation of the whole construction.

The joint connecting post, top plate and tie beam typically
relies on a jowled post, where the upper extremity of the post
is about twice as deep as the rest (that's the jowl), providing
sufficient wood for a pair of tenons, one into the top plate
and one into the tie beam.  From the pictures it looks like
these were originally hewn from a single piece of timber (I'd
be interested in learning how).

I intend to do most of the construction using 4x4 western red
cedar so am wondering if building up the top part of the post
using a short piece of 4x4 would be sensible.  I'd probably
resort to a bunch of screws for this part, even though that
would sort of violate the wood-only intent of the whole
constuction.

BTW, the above-mentioned book provides a good look at some
pretty fantastic woodwork, being mostly about cathedrals
and such (mainly sketches of the constructions of frames and
their joints, very few photos or descriptions of how these
frames were covered).  What I find really amazing is that the
pinnacle of what man has been able to achieve using wood only
occured many hundreds of years ago.

(I was also heartened to read that some of the roofs took
10-15 years to complete).

Paul Pedersen
Montreal (Quebec)
http://www.cam.org/~perrons/Paul/Woodwork/woodwork.html