Today, we made a dispenser to hold a roll of rubber membrane (20m long strips 500mm wide wrapped on a cardboard tube) so we could easily unroll each roll of rubber and cut them to the required lengths. We had a list of 16 numbers, optimised to minimise wastage off these 20m rolls.
Cutting-the-Rubber-for-gutters-to-length
We now have a pile of cut pieces ranging from 1.4m to 10.2m long, ready to be inserted into the guttering when we get to assemble each section around the house.
We then modified the dispenser by adding a cutting module, positioned at 380mm from one edge so we can produce a narrower strip of rubber for protecting the hip and ridge lines. The cutting module was made by sandwiching a classic razor blade in between two strip of battens and then screwed down to the upper layer of the cement board.
Rubber-slitting-machine
Even a razor blade struggled to cut the rubber membrane when we tried to slide it through the thin slot. But we realised that if one manually cut a short distance first, it started slicing fairly easily afterwards.
On Monday, we will slice the remaining four rolls and cut a further 15 lengths (10 hips, 5 ridges).