hammer beam

English

Noun

hammer beam (plural hammer beams)

1. (architecture) A member of a kind of roof truss (a hammer-beam truss), so framed as not to have a tiebeam at the top of the wall. Each principal has two hammer beams, which occupy the situation, and to some extent serve the purpose, of a tiebeam.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “hammer beam”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)