Author: Shaun

This morning, in bright sunshine but chilly air, we finished installed the last two middle rafters on the “H” section of the roof.

Then we spent the rest of the day measuring up the various sections of the roof on either sides of these middle groups of rafters on both the “H” and “P” sections. The “H” was pretty standard but the “P” had an extra O Ridge to take into account and we measured all of the positions to make sure all the sizes were known and we didn’t give ourselves any surprises. There are a total of 17 rafters on the “H” and 21 rafters on the “P” sections. These are the top few largest sections so is likely to take the whole week to prepare and manufacture for the “H” and another week for the “P” sections. We will see how we go!

P.S. Here is the picture of the P rafters we installed on Saturday (It was dark when we finished)

Today, in a quiet and chilly but with lovely sunshine, we got most of our rafters we had manufactured up and installed into the roof  structure.
The “L” section is now complete, all five rafters were done before lunch.

Then the “P” section was finished as the daylight faded away at 4pm (no picture, too dark!)
And finally, two of the four rafters for the “H” section was installed in total darkness, apart from our powerful floodlight shining down on the scene!

On Monday, we will finish off the middle portion of the “H” section and then we can measure up the necessary distances to start manufacturing the filling in set of rafters for both the “P” and “H” triangular portions, either side of the middle bit we have done today.

After repairing the Bevel Slicing machine, we proceeded to finish off the final two “L” rafters to have their bevel ends sliced in. So we now have five “L” rafters plus one odd pair of flanges (to fill in a large gap right up near the steel I-Beam end of the K Ridge) all ready.
To finish off the day, we went through the nine other rafters we had already constructed and tidied up the ends, especially the wall ends where our webbing wasn’t cut deep enough to keep clear of the noggin and the wall’s top-plate.
We have other commitments tomorrow (Friday) and we hope that Saturday will warm up and have melted all the snow and be dry so we can put up our 14 rafters we got ready!

After finishing the preparation work this morning, like filling up the glue dispenser bottle, cutting some more straight noggings as well as eight little “filler” noggings too, then collecting 14 polystyrene foam strips and finally sweeping the whole workshop, we were ready to start assembling the nine rafters in nine separate sessions.

And amazingly enough, we managed to do all nine rafters in one day! We are definitely speeding up our technique and procedures and now can turn around a long rafter in about 30 minutes on average – wow!

Tomorrow, we will look at our Bevel Slicing Machine and repair that. Also look to see where the leak in our garden shed roof is plus improve the coverings on our various timber storage stacks too. Then, we will Bevel cut the two remaining rafters and dress the nine rafters we did today to tidy them up and leave them all ready for Saturday to be installed outside.

First thing this morning, we hauled out the five “J” rafters outside and got them installed up into the roof. This cleared up some much needed space in our workshop.

We finished off the morning by finishing off converting the various templates to the new 40 degree mode.
After lunch, we started the preparation work for the “H” and “P” sections of the roof (these sections are over the Utility room and Bedroom 3 and back door, and over the Great Room respectively ). We needed 36 plywood webbing strips and 9 lengths of both the 63mm and 89mm CLS timber, all so we can make nine rafters (4 for the “H” and 5 for “P” sections).
We sliced the 40degrees ends on the webbing strips, cut down to required lengths and paired them off ready for their respective flanges. The flanges had also the 40degrees ends done (with two of the 89mm CLS having the Bird’s mouth cuts too) and all of them chopped down to their required lengths too.
We spent the remaining of the time making loads of noggings until the 18:00 “tools down” time arrived!
Tomorrow, we will proceed to make these nine rafters, hopefully all in the one day – that would be good!!

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.

We resumed our work (after a two day break) on manufacturing the remaining rafters for the “J” and “L” sections of the roof. There were 10 individual elements plus an odd one to fill in a small gap up on the “L” section near the steel I-Beam.
Half way through the task, after lunch, we went outside to measure the last set of rafters that connects to the steel I-Beam and these were on the “H” and “P” sections (at opposite ends of the house) the “H” being over the back door and Utility room + Bedroom 3 and the “P” section solely over the Great Room. We moved the scaffolding tower to each end of the building and did the measurements, ready for our spreadsheet .. it was very cold out there!
We finished the last four rafters after that, all done by 5pm and they are now curing. All ten will have their bevel ends cut on Monday and installed Tuesday.

This morning, in slightly breezy conditions, we took out the six rafters we have previously created and then completed the cutting of the bevel ends yesterday and got them all installed.

We did it all by hand without needing the electric hoist unit and it all went very well.
We then measured the length of the next set of rafters that will connect onto the IJ and LM diagonal valley beams and transferred the results to our spreadsheet.
After lunch, we brought in the next set of plywood webbing strips (25 of them), along with 5 lengths of the 63mm CLS and 6 lengths of the 89mm CLS timber. These were given the 33 degrees angled ends (for the last time .. no more 33 degrees roof sections after this lot!) and then cut down to the required sizes. These don’t have any clearance notches or bird’s mouths, just plain and simple.
These were sorted into five sets of two rafters for each production run in our 6 metre long template.
Then, brought in 25 straight noggings, 20 and 10 diagonal noggings (63mm and 89mm wide respectively) and 9 polystyrene foam strips.
We finished off the day by tidying up the whole workshop, taking outside a large heap of cut-offs plywood strips to our garden shed, filling up another couple bags of wooden bits of rubbish, swept the whole floor and got everything ready for Saturday to proceed with the manufacture of the next ten rafters to complete the “J” and “L” sections of the roof.