More Materials Ordered and Batten Glued on Rafters

We have been spending the last two days finalising the material bits and pieces we will need for concluding the work on our Skylight. Yesterday, we did lots of tests of applying different numbers of layers of fibre glass resin, to find out what level of application we will need to cover whole framework in white resin, reinforced with glass fibre strands, to make it fully waterproof and seal the timber against any dampness and causing condensation on our windows. We tested the test pieces this afternoon after it had 24hours to harden and we have concluded that we will need the glass fibre tissue layer but it didn’t make much difference whether to apply a diluted first resin coating or not. We now have ordered 25kg of finishing White coloured top coat resin, plus another 10kg of undercoat clear resin plus some more glass tissue mat.
Today, we spend the morning going through the final design of our bird disruptor system, to stop the pigeons from landing on our beautiful gleaming clean skylight and dropping their mess on it! The system isn’t a star-trek like disruptor device, it’s not that high tech, rather it is very low tech indeed! It is just three thin stainless steel wires suspended just above the surface of the ridge beam and the birds will get a fright when they come flying in to land and get tangled up with their wings! Hopefully, they will learn and keep away and hence not drop any mess!! We hope!
So we ordered some stainless steel 10mm threaded rod, angle iron (rather it’s stainless steel) and also 12mm round stainless steel rod too. While on the supplier’s web site, they had a special clearance offer on aluminium bars so we analysed what we needed for our electrical bus-bars for our 50VDC and 12VDC circuits and ordered 19mm by 12mm bars, 27 lengths of 4metres each. Lastly, we got a length of 50mm by 25mm T shape aluminium piece for making end caps on all the rafters to both hold up the glazing panes and seal off the ends of the rafter glazing bars too.
Finally, we finished off the day by going out with our pile of the battens we created last week and glued and nailed them to the rafters. We used an aluminium guide bar we had lying around to provide a straight edge to make sure our battens were flat (ready to have the triple glazing unit to press up flat) and then glued with PVA and then fired a half dozen brad nails to hold while the glue dried.
Tomorrow, we will finish off the two ends with the diagonals and then start working on the next series of batten but this time, they are angled shaped pieces that go up on the ridge beam and down on the rim edges.