ABSTRACT
Europe has a considerable legacy of historic timber structures, particularly roof trusses. As opposed to modern timber structures, most of the historic ones are not engineered, but designed and constructed according to craftsmen's traditions. Roof trusses developed along different tradition lines in different regions of Europe, generally in alignment with language borders. The most striking differences between modern timber structures and historic ones concern the general layout and the details of carpentry joints. Knowledge and understanding of historic timber structures has dwindled. The mechanical assessment of existing timber structures played a very subordinate role in modern engineering science. The chapter shows that most preceived problems of typical historic roof trusses vanish when simple nonlinear spring models, and that the results depend only marginally on the actual input stiffness values. In historic roof trusses, very few soulaces can be found which show traces of overloading in tension.
