Yesterday, we have been doing the final calculations of how much aluminium glazing bars we will need to do our Skylight and fix all our pieces of glazing units we got up there. it comes to a total of nine 3m plus a further five 4.8m lengths of the standard rafter bars and a collection of the ridge bars, four various lengths from 3m to 4.8m. This design of this glazing system has a nice completely covering white anodised aluminium cap to deflect all the rain from entering any of the screw holes and reduces the chance of rain getting into the inner workings. They cost about £750 and should be here in a week or so.
Then we carried on with the analysis of the Skylight ‘hole’ in the roof, trying to understand how it is situated and finally we got a handle on it at last. The rest of the day was spent on adjusting our ‘work table’ to reflect the reality, making a kink at the mid-point and skewing one end.
Today, we levelled off the two long sides to avoid too many ‘up and down’ wobbles and then put up five Ridge posts ready to support the main central ridge beam. Just before lunch, we pulled out from our timber stockpile, the three pieces of timber (70mm thick and 93mm high – approximately 4inch by 3inch) we bought for the job .. but only to discover that two of them have warped badly, twisting down the length and bowing sideways too. Plus also, these planks have been cut from the middle of the tree and the tight rings have also buckled and distorted what was once a flat surface! O boy! We spent the afternoon analysing and talking about how we can cope with this, how to correct it if possible, bearing in mind that they are heavy and thick planks of timber. We were not confident that we could correct the twisting nature but what really stopped us, was the bulging grain (the rings) in the timber along the height of the wood and even though we could plane it using our planer machine, we were not sure whether it would just carry on distorting and twisting even more after we have made our Skylight module.
Wonky-wood
We decided that we couldn’t take the risk and went to investigate the availability of LVL timber, how long it would take to order and how much too. We would buy 78mm thick by 220mm high and about 7metres long but the first quote we got was a price of £120 for the timber and £95 for the delivery!! Eek! Ouch!
It then occurred to us that we could make our own ridge beam by using three layers of 63mm wide CLS timber, planing down the thickness (to remove the rounded edges), stack them up on top of each other, overlapping the joints, removing any bad knots and gluing it all together and .. hey presto .. we would end up with our required Ridge Beam measuring 63mm wide by 105mm high! We will tackle that job tomorrow! And it would only cost about £40 in total for the timber and probably about £10 for the glue and it would only take about a day to do the work! So Much Cheaper, and much more satisfying! Phew!