This morning, we finished off cutting and preparing the two long diagonal Hip Rafters for the Front Door Porch roof. We sliced a little bit off the end at the top, drilled a couple of clearance holes and then sliced the Bird’s Mouth notch in the exact position, following real measurements outside using a short template pieces so we can get a more accurate distance from the Bird’s mouth, up to the top where it meets the apex of the roof. One more drill hole put here and then both went outside to be installed up into place.
Front-Porch-Hip-Rafters-Installed
It went in very well indeed, thanks goodness!
After lunch, we got on wit the job of creating the 12 “C” Rafters, to go with the one already created and installed out there, The C7 Rafter! Firstly, we marked out regular place settings at every 611mm so that for a whole 8feet sheet, there will be a 4mm gap to allow for thermal and moisture expansion throughout the year. Then, we measured the length of C8 and C6 rafters plus C12 and C2. These numbers went into our spreadsheet to calculate the intermediate lengths of the other rafters. We grabbed five more lengths of 89mm CLS timber and after putting on the bird’s mouth notches on the end of these five CLS pieces, we proceeded to cut down to the required lengths. It was a a complex operation, having to cut the exact length right angles first, before putting this end into the chop saw that has our complicated template to allow us to slice a 61degrees cut one way and at the same time, slice a 20degrees tilting angled cut to form the bevel end to marry up against the diagonal Hip Rafter. We had to fiddle with lots of test pieces before we had a consistent and repeatable setup to produce accurate shaped ends.
Rafters-C8-to-C13-Made
In the last half of an hour, in the deepening dark, we took outside several of our new C rafters to test fit them and it seems to be ok, apart from the diagonal Hip Rafters having a bit of a bow in their length (which we can draw it back straight again when we screw and glue our new C rafters on to it) but also the very smallest one, the C13 one, seems to not fit quite as well as the others. We will analyse further on Monday when we had a rest and our brains have warmed up and recovered ready for sorting that out!! Smile!