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.
Rafters-P18-to-P21-Installed
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.
Bearing-fixing-ring
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.