Category: Rafters

We used our new piece of equipment today, a niffy little band saw machine we bought yesterday, to make a collection of wooden spacers of variable thickness. We sliced a 100mm long piece of our CLS timber into lots of spacers, some thin (about 1mm thick), some at 3mm thick, some at 6mm thick and a few at 10mm thick.
Armed with our collection of spacers, battery circular saw, glue and a staple gun, we started working on checking the alignment of the ends of our rafters in each section of the roof. Using a 100mm by 50mm regularised long plank (4.8metres long), that was very straight (we had to reject half a dozen before we found one that was nice and straight within 1mm or so), we placed it up on our wooden fascia support brackets and examined if any rafter was sticking out more than its neighbours. After careful analysis, some of these had a small sliver taken off their ends and some had extra spacers added (using our new collection of course!), stuck down with glue and a couple of staples to hold while the glue set. We also sprayed more timber preservative on these modified ends to reduce problems in the future.

We proceeded clockwise around the house, starting from the “A” section of the roof, and did “P” (two halves), “O”, “N”, “M”, “L”, “K”, “J”, “I” “H” and “F”. We have only four more sections to go to complete the circuit. It was quite rewarding to have made these adjustments and now we can look forward to putting up our Fascia boards and have them aligned up, be flat and all at the same level too! Lovely!

Today, in some lovely sunshine but with a chilly wind, we concluded the installation of the five “N” rafters and twelve “K” rafters!

This, finally, at last, sees the end of manufacturing and installing of the full sized rafters all over the whole roof, adding up to a total of 176 rafters!!
One Big Phew! That was one long job!
But we are not finished yet ..
We have to build out the porches for the front door and for the back door plus also the conservatory dormer next!

This morning, we did the final stage of preparing the completed rafters before they will go out and installed up into the Roof. The “K” section, twelve rafters (ten full sized and two top-flange only ones) had the bevel angled sliced off the ends of the rafters, plus with bolt clearance holes drilled through too.
Then, we planed the ends of the remaining five “N” rafters, the ends that will go up and sit against the “O” Ridge beam. We would like to have a flatter surface for the glue to spread more evenly and get a stronger joint.

This really concludes the work in our workshop for the manufacture of all these roof rafters, for both the heavy duty LVL diagonal rafters (17 of them) and 176 of the regular full sized rafters, plus a half dozen of top-flange only rafters. The next job, apart from installing these rafters when the (ugh!) weather allows us, is to build out the porch over the front door area and the back door too, plus a “Dormer” like roof extension over the conservatory section of the roof, using just 89mm CLS timber.

We started the day off, in the morning sunshine, by installing the rest of the “O” Rafters (six of them) and doing the first three of the “N” rafters before we stopped for lunch.

We had to some servicing work on our septic processing unit after lunch which took a couple of hours and then we carried on in the workshop to complete the final four “K” Rafters to complete all twelve of those.

This completes the construction of the 172 composite rafters which make of the major parts of the roof.
The next job, on Monday, is to install the remaining five “N” rafters up into the roof (weather permitting) and then cut the angled bevel ends on all the “K” rafters before we install them over Monday and Tuesday.

In between rain showers, when the sun came out this morning, we got outside to firstly bring in six sheets of our 12mm plywood from our main stack (after these six sheets, we have 119 left). Then we got the final rafter installed right up in the far left back corner of the building (P2) and then went around the corner to do two of the O rafters (O9 and O8) before the rain came.

We retired back to the workshop to slice up the six sheet of the plywood, to make 18 webbing strips to complete the final set of the “K” rafters. These then were measured and sliced to length with their 45 degree angled ends and wall notches cut out of them. That concluded the preparation stage and we then had time to make six out of the ten we have got to do.
On Saturday, we will see what the weather is doing and either go outside to carry on installing more “O” rafters or carry on building the final four “K” rafters. We will see!!

With the wet weather outside, we stayed dry in the workshop and carried on with the task of slicing angled bevel ends on the fourteen rafters we have already made, eight for the “N” section and six for the “O” section. Plus the one we did yesterday for the odd P2 rafter, we now have done a total of fifteen, all ready to be put up into the roof and get the Great Room all done.
For our afternoon session, we started the job of preparing all the parts to make the final set of twelve “K” rafters. We brought in another five lengths of the 89mm CLS timber and along with the three (and a bit) lengths of the 63mm CLS timber we already had in the workshop, we then proceeded to chop them up into all the individual parts. Twelve of the 89mm wide ones to make the top flange with had the bird’s mouth cut into it, and ten parts of the 63mm wide ones for the bottom flange, all having the 45degrees angle ends.
That concluded the day’s work and tomorrow, with the dryer weather, we will bring in six sheets of plywood and get them sliced up into eighteen more 400mm wide strips to make the webbing to go towards making the final 10 full-sized rafters.

This morning, after a slight delay, we got outside and reassembled our platform on our tower and got up four more rafters to almost finish off the “P” section of the roof.

That brought us up to lunch and the job for the rest of the day was to slice the bevelled ends to all the other rafters we have already made in the workshop.
But .. ..
We were slicing the first rafter of the 12 we got to do when the Bevel Slicing Machine started vibrating quite badly and when we looked at it we found that the blade was moving in and out of the gearbox. Oh Boy, Does this mean the gears have broken under the stress of slicing these very large items?
So we took apart the saw and got inside to the gearbox and discovered that nothing was broken after all! it seems that one of the ball race had slipped and this made the axle move in and out and caused the saw blade to vibrate and bind in the saw cut.
We realised that there should be a metal “washer” disc covering the ball race to stop it moving so we got a piece of metal, cut it into the circle shape, drilled three holes to fix it down and put a large hole in the middle for the axle to come through.

We greased the gearbox and put everything back together and the quick tests passed with flying colours. We then finished off the rafter (P2) we were doing and that was the end of the day!
That was close! We didn’t have to go out and buy another circular saw unit and tomorrow, we will continue to slice the rest of the rafters and get them outside to complete “N” and “O” sections.

This afternoon, after the morning was occupied with other tasks, we got outside to firstly, rescue our fallen scaffolding tower, to push it back upright again. We did take off the wooden platform first to make the “top” end much lighter and it turned out to be quite simple and easy to push it back by hand.
This allowed us the room to move the taller tower along to the “K” Ridge / angled parts to measure the final, yes the very final section of the roof, the “K” section which is over the back of the house and Bedroom Two. This set of numbers will go into our spreadsheet as usual and that will give us our final calculated set of numbers for the timber flanges and plywood webbing strips.
Then, we returned to the workshop to assemble and create the last two rafters to complete the set for the “N” section over the Great Room.
And finally, we did a quick service of our giant air compressor, to clean out the air filter and release the drain valve underneath the tank to let out the water. It has been several years since the last time and there seems to be about 600ml to 700ml of water! This water comes out of the air and there isn’t that much in a volume of air so we must have compressed rather a lot of it .. Wow!
Tomorrow, we will either go outside and install more rafters to finish off the “P” section or if it is raining, we will cut the bevel ends on the “N” and “O” set of freshly made rafters and then carry on with preparing the parts for completing the final 12 (10 full sized plus 2 little top-flange only rafters) in the workshop.

This morning, our 75 sheets of pretty plywood arrived. The lorry managed to get down our Loke, and we placed our flat bed trolley alongside. We then pulled off the plywood, sheet by sheet. This allowed the delivery bloke to get off to his next port of call.

We then moved half the pile by taking 3 sheets at a time and walked about 15 metres to our new storage tent. Eventually, we were able to move the trolley itself, with much slipping and sliding on the snow, and got the remaining sheets unloaded.

This plywood is much nicer than the last lot (well we bought it as pretty)

After lunch, we resumed in the lovely and warm workshop and created five more rafters.

That’s was enough for Shaun’s back so tomorrow we will finish off the last two rafters and get ready for doing the “K” section by measuring the final set of rafters! Hurray!