Phil in SF quoted 61 Hours by Lee Child (Jack Reacher, #14)
The prairie topsoil had been too deep for the excavation to reach bedrock, so the whole space was basically a huge six-sided wooden box built from massive balks of timber banded with iron.
— 61 Hours by Lee Child (Jack Reacher, #14) (Page 308 - 309)
new vocabulary: balks
a roughly squared timber beam
