Colorado Timberframe employees worked 24 hours a day, six days a week for 11 months straight, cutting wood to build the largest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world: a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark, as described in the Bible.
The crew sent 180 semi-trucks filled with timber components to Williamstown, Ky., where they oversaw construction of the Ark Encounter, a sister attraction to Answers In Genesis‘ Creation Museum about an hour away.
“It was an amazing honor,” said Colorado Timberframe president Keenan Tompkins. “No one has done this before.”
“Except for Noah,” joked Jason Schimpf, lead installer.
“And it’s been a while,” Tompkins quipped.
The first phase of the Ark Encounter cost $91 million. The ark has exhibits housed inside its hull and stands 15 feet above the ground, held up by concrete buried 30 feet deep. The timber weighs 4.2 million pounds. The Ark Encounter has advertised that the ark is 510 feet long, but Colorado Timberframe said it’s actually 6 inches shy of 550 feet.
The ark’s design is based on dimensions from the Biblical story of Noah, who was told by God to build an ark and fill it with animals so they, and his family, could survive a worldwide flood. But this ark is slightly different from the one described in the Bible, Tomkins said. “I can guarantee you it will not float.”
The ark was a hefty endeavor for Colorado Timberframe’s team, which normally numbers 45 people. Crews worked around the clock at the company’s Lafayette headquarters while Schimpf oversaw the installation in Kentucky. The entire ark project took 18 months to complete. The attraction opened earlier this month.
To meet the deadline, additional workers and specialists were required. Tompkins said about 1,000 people worked on the project overall, with more than 300 people working on site at one time.
Schimpf, who moved his family to Kentucky and home-schooled his kids while working on the ark, said construction was on a tight but organized schedule. Once a truck came in, the crew unload it and immediately put it into production. The teams in Kentucky and Colorado were in constant communication.
“We did a lot of knocking on wood,” Tompkins said, walking over to a pile of wood and tapping it. “Even now I want to do it even though it’s over.”
The giant ark and its 1.2 million board feet of square timber required a lot of trees. Tompkins said the team used a lot of responsibly harvested Douglas fir from Washington, Utah and Canada.
Answers in Genesis also wanted large logs to hold up parts of the boat, the largest being nearly 5 feet in diameter. To meet the specification, they found standing-dead Engelmann spruce trees in a Utah forest that were 200 years old, Tompkins said.
Part of the reason Colorado Timberframe won the bid for the project was because it is one of only a few companies in North America to have a machine big enough to work with the large materials.
Schimpf said he read about the ark in the paper about 2 1/2 years ago and told Tompkins that they couldn’t miss this opportunity.
Building the ark was hard work, but Tompkins and Schimpf said the complicated part was maintaining their regular business. The company did about 55 other projects last year.
The company mainly does high-end residential work and only a few commercial projects. Tomkins and Schimpf said they hope the ark has raised Colorado Timberframe’s profile, so it can do more commercial projects.
A spokeswoman with Colorado Timberframe said the company has already received more calls since the project and some clients like to brag to friends that their house was built by the same people who built the ark.
“If we can do the ark, we can do anything,” Schimpf said. “We knew we could do anything, we just proved it.”
UPDATED This story was updated at 1:22 p.m. Aug. 1, 2016, to clarify that Colorado Timberframe did about 55 projects in addition to the Ark Encounter last year.