This afternoon (the morning was skipped due to other commitments), we got down to the task of slicing the bevelled ends on all the remaining rafters for the “J” and “L” sections.

We managed to do all five “J” rafters and then did three out of the five “L” rafters before our Bevel Slicing Machine developed a fault in the electrics. Oh Damn and Blast!! We took the covers off the motor and upon close inspection, there are signs of the copper wires in the windings are showing cracks in the insulations, probably caused by overheating. We realised that the motor is working very hard and getting hot so we tried to keep it cooled down by halting every now and again and let the motor run without any load to blast cool air through the motor unit. But alas, the motor still suffered, probably early on when we first started doing this task several weeks ago and perhaps not realising how hot things were getting and the damage was already done.
We will have to replace the saw module with a new one which we have now ordered off the web.
In the meantime, we carried on with the measurement of the “H” section to confirm our numbers we did last week on Saturday and we now have a better set of numbers for our spreadsheet. And finally, we started converting our various templates to the new 40degree angle as we are now entering the next stage on our roof. Tomorrow, we will start preparing the material bits and pieces to build four rafters for the “H” and five rafters for the “P” sections. Despite our trouble with the Slicing machine, we are not going to lose too much time as we can get on with these new rafters while we wait for the repairs.

By Shaun

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