Today, following on from Saturday’s work, we designed and built a slate cutting guillotine with supporting stand which has rubbish collection built in.
Slate-cutting-guillotine-and-stand
The guillotine sits on top of the box like container and there are standard measured marks to help us repeatedly slice certain slates at various required sizes.
The next piece of equipment we made, was a couple of containers to hold the various types of nails (the stainless steel slate hooks and two sizes of copper nails).
Box-of-slate-hooks
Box-of-copper-nails-with-tool-storage
Next item were two templates to guide us to align the slates at the required 204mm spacing, made using a 38mm wide batten with nails hammered in at the correct distances.
Slate-spacing-marking-sticks
Finally, the second guide template was a metal affair with notches at the nailing points, again at the 204mm spacing but also marked are the half way points (the 102mm distance) between the notches, to allow us to align to the chalk line on the tile battens.
SLate-hook-fixing-guide
Hopefully these pieces of equipment will provide consistency, ease of getting the job done and achieve a neat finishing touch to our roof. We now need to have good weather!!