Long story short use 6x6 for your model
ok the above is the short answer now for the very long drawn out answer
I do this for a living. Taking known dimensions and extrapolate from a photo.
Here are my observations.
First off what some seam to think are lines defining boards on the end of the building are in fact just wide gaps between boards and the so called boards thus defined are actually made up of several smaller boards that are not as obvious. You can tell because not all spaces are the same size this is because some have less boards between the wide gaps. So the end wall is covered by probably a hundred individual boards.
that being said this is not really the question.
The problem is you don’t have or at least don’t provide enough info. We need some know dimension of something to base this on. And we don’t have it. As note the end of the car sticks out bast the table end wall and thus is not useful for determining a dimension.
We donut know the. Building width so we can’t determine it that way either.
We don’t know the size of the end boards. The could be 2” to 6”. (I am guess 2.5”. But that is just and educated guess and not based on anything we know). So we can’t compare that.
Now what we can tell is that the trim boards on the end of the roof are obviously bigger then the post. So this gives us something to work from.
If we assume that those boards are at best 12” then we are getting someplace. Why 12” mak you ask? Well this type of construction is ment to be inexpensive if the budget was bigger they would have built a full building or use brick or something. And inexpensive construction means the stuck with standard lumber and at no point was anything over 12” inexpensive standard lumber. Before the went over 12” they would have moved the rafter or whatever closer together. So we can safely say the trim on the end of the roof is no bigger then 12” and probably smaller.
So if we look at the post in relation to the trim we can clearly see the posts are MUCH smaller.
So now we know the posts can’t be bigger then say 8”. But what else do we know.
Well this is an older building and rough construction so the posts are either old finished sizes or the are rough full sized boards. Once again this is inexpensive construction and it is not passenger related so no point in spending money to get finished posts. So odds are it is basically full sized. So instead of 3,5. Or 5.5 or 7.25. You probably have 4,6 or 8”.
Ok what else can we figure out. Well old lumber was drastically stronger then today’s lumber. So much so that I could use a 2x6 where today I would use a 2x10. Add in that back then the building codes were a joke if the existed and you tend to see a lot smaller lumber then we use today.
What else? Well cranes and sky trucks and lifts were not common then so these posts were set up by hand odds are. And tall posts are a pain. And larger tall posts get really hard to set by hand. So they would have preferred more smaller posts then fewer big posts. So odds are 4x or 6x
Looking at the photo, and considering the relative size of the end boards and the trim and everything else I would guess 6x. But 4x is possible. Now this is not much help I know. But... look at it from a different point of view. Presumably you are trying to model this. So you want it to look right. Well if you probably are best off mocking it up and seeing if it looks right. You realy don’t care if it is right you are not doing structure load calls you just want it to look good. So in much the same way as we make the joints on brick to wide so we can see it you want to make it “look” right.
And if I had to guess I would say a model using 4x4 (especially if that is 3.5x3”5) will look to spindly.
So long story short I would go with 6x6 (non sq posts are very uncommon). And anyone saying the stalled this or stalled that is at best guessing as there is nothing to scale from that is both a known dimension, accurate enough to not get lost in rounding error and on the same plane as the posts.
Now if you know more about this building or have other photos or something then we may get closer. And feel free to let me know and I will help you as best I can.
Like I said I do this all the time. I once guessed a dimension of 104’. From one very bad photo taken on a huge angle and a sketch of an airport that was sized to fit in a regular sheet of paper and based on logic. when we measured the space it was 104’4”. So I do know what I am doing. And frankly you don’t have enough info to truly know.
I keep thinking about doing an article or clinic on how to guesstimate dimensions from photos and other photo analysis stuff but I have yet to figure out a good way to write it up.
-Doug M
