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Dealing with the safety assessment of existing buildings engineers often have to face the diagnosis of old timber structures. The current standards framework does not provide clear prescriptions about the evaluation of these kinds of structures, so the principal aim of this work is to outline an alternative methodology that leaves the concept of “Knowledge Level” and “Confidence Factor”, usually applied for existing buildings. An experimental campaign carried out on old timber joists supplied a sample of homogeneous data that were the support to the theoretical reasoning. Keywords: Old timber, Mechanical behaviour, Safety assessment, Existing buildings, Confidence Factor