These last two days has seen the start of the building the next set of rafters. The metal brackets pieces were painted to give them a semi protection against rust while they are exposed to the weather to until the roof is on!
Splice-plates-painted
Then we sliced up some polystyrene foam blocks to make the inserts for the K Ridge and the O Ridge elements (including the angled bits going down to the walls). and finally, to finish off the first day yesterday, we measured the diagonal distances from the K wall corners and middle location, back to the central point on the steel I-Beam and analyse this against the drawings. It turned out to be pretty close, only 10mm offset for the two outside corners and 19mm offset in the middle of the K wall. This is close enough for us to continue to build the K Ridge and if there is any adjustment needed to be made, we can slice off little pieces off the beginning of the K ridge during installation.
Today, we sorted out all the plywood strips we had already made, also took all the “waste” plywood strips and moved them into our garden shed for storage and easier access. We spent all day slicing up more plywood sheets and other strips to generate all the webbing we will need to complete the remaining Special LVL Rafters, as follows:
- 9 x 400mm wide
- 6 x 413mm
- 12 x 423mm (already done previously)
- 18 x 455mm (taken from 20 strips left-over pieces)
- 4 x 477mm (two already made with a further 2 today)
- 4 x 508mm wide and that’s it!
We tidied up the pile of these plywood strips and put all the ones that will make the O Ridge series of rafters and stored them in the garden shed. Also, we brought in four lengths of our LVL timber pieces, 3 x 4190mm and 1x 3500mm lengths. We got our template back into shape again and started with our first rafter, the K Ridge. This 477mm wide object has 4 strips of the webbing and sliced a shallow angle cut (only 10.5 degrees) on one end of the plywood. This end will be push into the metal bracket and joined onto the second part of the rafter, the K Angled, which goes down at a 45 degree slope to the wall.
Tomorrow, we will cut the LVL timber and then sand to get them ready for gluing and nailing.