Yesterday and today, we got going in actually creating the next stage of rafter production! But we also had to do some minor adjustment to our polystyrene foam strips because we discovered yesterday that our let-over chunk of the polystyrene foam was a little more than the 200mm wide we thought it would be. So we had to pass the couple of dozen strips through the hot wire cutting machine again to trim off a thin waste bits. Plus the other discovery was our straight internal noggins were very slightly too long and needed to be trimmed down to 248mm long so that was another hour of work to sort out that annoyance.
We made one rafter yesterday (hence how we discovered these problems!!) and this morning, we took it outside to see how it fitted.
It went in fairly well but we need to do some adjustment here too. the slot on the cement boards on the outside of the walls were not quite deep enough so that needed chiselling a bit lower. Also a fraction of the webbing was protruding and fouling onto the wall’s leg, and finally, the top end of the rafter had to have a very slight trim on the top flange to allow the whole rafter to sit into the wooden slot better.
Rafter-A6-installed
After lunch today, we carried on creating some more rafters and changing over to use a different glue nozzle to help speed up the application of the wood glue, we managed to complete three more rafters in the 3 hours of the afternoon.
Rafters-A7-A9-Made
It looks like that we can do about one rafter per hour for a full size long ones (5metres in length) and we will try and get those ones we made today up and installed in the morning – weather permitting, we have strong winds forecasted for tonight!