Category: Rafters

Today we approached the task of slicing the bevelled ends on our nine rafters that are filling in the two triangular gaps in the “M” section of the roof. This morning, we managed to slice M1 with the 47 degree angle for the bevel end ok but it proved more and more difficult to do the next ones (M2 to M5). We ended up having to finish off the operation using the power planer to remove the excess material.
At least, we now have up and installed into the roof framework those set of rafters by mid-afternoon.

We decided to bring everything back in as the day was drawing to a close and we wanted to tackle the problem with our Bevel Slicing Machine.

We replaced two small blocks on the back edge of the saw base with one continuous long strip which is anchored at one end and allows the other end to swivel in and out. This seems to improve things but still very puzzling to why this is happening in the first place. We finally concluded the day with M14, M15 and M16 rafters having their bevel sliced and in the morning, we will do M17 and get them outside, up and installed. We will also take a closer look inside the saw mechanism to inspect the joints and metal plates to make sure things are still ok.

Today, we finished off preparing all the parts to build the nine rafters that will fill in the two ends of the “M” section of the roof. The CLS timber were chopped down with their proper 32 degrees angled ends at their required lengths.
Then, with all the left-over pieces of the timber, we made more noggings for future manufacturing of more rafters and finished off the morning with a general clean up of the workshop, ready for the gluing and nailing of the rafter in the afternoon.
In the afternoon we assembled all nine rafters, starting with three at once!

All nine rafters are now created and sitting drying and setting ready to be installed on Monday. Also, on Monday, we will slice the bevel ends on all rafters too and get them all up by the end of the day – we hope!

This afternoon, we started the task of preparing all the bits and pieces that makes up the nine rafters (five from M1 to M5 and four from M14 to M17) which fills in the two triangular sections of the M roof area. We pulled out 24 strips of the plywood webbing from our outside storage stack and proceeded to organise and slice the 32degrees angled ends on them all. Next came the job of cutting the clearance notch on one end of each set (this to allow the rafter to fit up and over the steel I-Beam).

Finally, to finish off the day, we collected five lengths of both the 89mm CLS and 63mm CLS timber, and got them in our workshop, ready for chopping the angles on the flanges on Saturday. We also organised which of the nine rafters will go into our assemble template for construction and came up with four individual sessions to create all nine rafters, hopefully all in one afternoon!

This morning, we took out the last two rafters of the batch of eight we had made this week. They went up just fine.

Now we have also measured the necessary data for the two filling in areas on either side of this block of eight rafters in the “M” section of the roof. These measurements are now in our spreadsheet and we can start on preparing and building up the heap of separate elements for making the rafters.

This morning, we hauled the six rafters we completed yesterday outside, ready to be installed later on making room in our workshop, in order to complete off the two full sized rafters left over from the batch of eight we had to do.

So after lunch, under a threatening sky of possible rain, we proceeded to hoist up and install the six rafters starting at the M6 point (at the corner of the L wall and M wall) and went towards the Great Room. All six went up without much difficulty and all before the threat of rain which actually never arrived after all!! But, despite that, we didn’t want to risk our two recently created rafters we did this morning, just in case it did actually rain and weakened the glue joints while it was still curing and drying.

So tomorrow, we will put up those two rafters and carry on with the job of measuring the two triangular fill-in areas on either sides of the eight rafters and retire back to the workshop to make a start on building those rafters of varying sizes for this “M” and also for the “E” and “I” sections of the roof too.

Today, we resumed our task of creating rafters, this time for the section along the “M” wall / roof area. We managed to do six out of the eight we got to do. We would have done seven and perhaps even all eight if we hadn’t had the interruption of a visitor coming this morning.
It was the usual job of assembling the top and bottom flanges and the webbing into our template, gluing each side followed by a line of nails, flipping over and repeating this process again.

We will do the final two in the morning and then start the job of hauling the dry ones outside and getting them up there into the roof framework. Let’s hope the weather will be kind to us!

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 measurements to get the distances for the “in-fill” sections on either side of the rafters (as they are the only full length rafters in these walls), the minimum and maximum lengths. We took down 2 pairs of measurements for the “E” section and another 2 pairs of measurement for the “I” section. All this then got entered into our spreadsheet which will calculate the lengths of all the remaining rafters needed to fill in these triangular areas of the roof.
But the next step on Monday is to complete the eight rafters for the “M” section and then get them installed, hopefully, on Tuesday.

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 other three had the narrow version of the steel clearance slots. Plus a further 11 pairs had the wall top-plate clearance notches cut away. The final job before lunch was to chop up more internal straight noggins and some more little filler noggins too.
After lunch, we exactly trimmed all the CLS timber pieces (that had the scarf jointed extensions) to match what the spreadsheet indicates. We brought in a heap of polystyrene foam strips and then vacuumed the whole workshop to remove most of the sawdust as possible and then finally got down to assembling the three rafters, which were E6 and E7 and the I6 rafters.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we will take these three completed rafters outside and installed them and get our workshop cleared, ready for the next eight “M” rafters to be created on Saturday.

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 lengths and cut various pieces off another two lengths which are the extension bits to add to the scarf joints. These were glued and screwed together and left to set overnight. Oh yes, the other ends of these pieces had the bird’s mouth cut into them plus the angled slice off the end too.
Next the heap of the 63mm CLS were also cut with the angled ends (still 32 degrees) and then turned around to then cut a precise length off of each one in turn according to our spreadsheet. These all form 11 rafters, 8 for the “M” wall, 1 for the “I” wall and 2 for the “E” wall. These are known measured lengths so we can assemble these ones and get them installed.

Tomorrow, we will bring in 50 strips of our 400mm wide plywood strips from off the storage stack outside and cut the angled slices off the ends as usual and also cut the special shaped slots for the clearance of the steel I-Beam and for the wall and top-plate too. It was fiddly but we got there today and hopefully tomorrow we can start assembling complete rafters and get them ready for some to go up on Friday.

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 at the bottom left corner to try and offset this skewness. And yes it did seems to do the trick. We then did the next rafter, A5, and repeated the bevel slice and this time we got a much better cut first time. We are a little bit more confident of the machine now. The proof came when we took these two rafters outside to get them up and installed. We decided to try and man handle them up ourselves as we had a great advantage with these rafters as the wall ends fits like a glove and actually anchors the whole rafter into place. We only needed to hold the top end to relieve the strain and make sure we don’t accidentally break the Bird’s mouth joints.

We fixed them the same by screwing a 8mm coach screws, one in the bottom and one in the top of each rafter and also glued of course too! It went very well and flat against the PA diagonal beam which further enhanced our confidence that the Bevel Slicing Machine is performing better.

Then after lunch, we went around measuring the other similar sections of the roof, namely the “M”, “I” and “E” sections by moving the tall scaffolding tower around, as all are having the same 32degrees slopes. During this task, we were concerned that we were getting spurious misleading measurements along the top flange distances because our template was not going flat against the Kerb of the Skylight and this was proven when we placed the spirit level on the template and the position of the Kerb was slightly proud of the steel webbing underneath. This caused us to reconsider and switch over to measuring the bottom flange distances instead as we realised that this aspect of the rafter element is much more “stable” and the main structural load points is on the bottom flange at the top and the shape of the wall end (the top-plate and legs) are much more accurate to where the Bird’s Mouth goes. So we took down a series of distances to then enter into our spreadsheet, ready for preparing the elements of the rafters in our workshop tomorrow. There are 10 more long rafters to make and a heap of the bevelled rafters to fill in those corners of the roof sections.