Today,we took outside the completed three rafters, these being the E6 and E7 as well as I6. It was the usual case of using our winch motor to lift them up, do a test fit, make any last minute adjustments and then glue and nail the rafter into place. Then we proceeded to take further […]
This morning, we finished off preparing all the bits and pieces for making our next batch of rafters. We brought in 48 strips of the plywood webbing and proceeded to pair them up and slice the 32degree angled ends. Then eight pairs had the steel I-Beam (the large version) clearance slot put in, and the […]
Today, armed with our new version of the spreadsheet that now calculates everything from the basis of the measured bottom flange, we proceeded to bring in 15 lengths of 89mm CLS timber plus 11 lengths of the 63mm CLS timber. The first job was to cut the scarf joints in 12 of our 89mm CLS […]
This morning, we tackled the next rafter, the A4, to slice the bevel on the end of it, analysing the results. It was still inclining to curve outwards during the sawing and we surmised that the saw blade was ever so slightly off line. So we attached a thin 1mm plastic spacer on the sled […]
Our new week started with us making a second saw guide template for doing “right-handed” Bevel slices. Next we serviced the Bevel Slicing Machine and made sure that all the nuts and bolts are tight and locked against vibrations by using thread lock glue (similar to superglue) and also mounted a handy wooden block on […]
Just before lunch, we tried out our new Bevel Slicing machine for the first time on the smallest rafter A22 to see how it went. The machine and template performed very well, we are glad to say! We took out this little 1 metre rafter outside to test fit it and it went in not […]
This morning, we concluded the creation of the new Bevel Slicing machine with the addition of of a G-clamp to anchor the required angle for the bevel. Then we created a much simpler guide template that fits over the end of a rafter and provide both a starting platform to rest the saw machine and […]
Today, we turned to making a new tool to help us slice angled ends to a certain number of our rafters that needs to fit up against diagonal hip or valley beams in the roof. We took an old portable electric circular saw and cut away the original blade shroud to allow a much larger […]
Today we got down to assembling all the bits and pieces into nine rafters that form the last sections of roof adjoining the “A” wall. We did three this morning (in two runs) and the remaining six this afternoon (in 3 runs). We used as much of the template as possible to maximise turnaround time. […]
We carried on with the preparation task for making the final Ten rafters that makes up the Roof section along the “A” wall. These ten rafters are the in-fill pieces that both goes along the Hip rafter (five for the PA diagonal travelling across the Great Room) and for the valley rafter (five for the […]