Category: Build Progress

Today, we entered into the joyous task of assembling the 13 rafters that will see the completion of the “H” section of the roof (the right hand side of the house over the Utility Room, Back door and Bedroom 3).
The first run was to put together the four smallest rafters and then a further three sessions were completed before we had a problem! Shaun suffered a twinge in his lower back and had to “go slow”, see Back Muscle Twinge but we managed to finish off the final session.

These 13 rafters are now done and waiting for the next job of having their bevel ends cut and next week, being installed into the roof.
The rest of the afternoon was spent calculating the quantity of CLS timber we would need to build up a pile of material to do the “P” section, this being 10 and 9 lengths of 89mm and 63mm CLS timber respectively and a further 24 strips of the plywood webbing. Stephen brought these into the workshop to acclimatised, ready for slicing and chopping to required sizes next week.

These last two days has been the task of making various bits and pieces to continue manufacturing more rafters, the main task being slicing up a further 24 sheets of 8 foot by 4 foot plywood boards into our 400mm wide strips. This was yesterday’s job, having to break into our second pile of plywood sheets, unwrapping several layers of protection: one tarpaulin outer cover, then a plastic “bag” and loads of Clingfilm off the pallet containing 75 sheets and removing 24 of them and, hey hoe, wrapping it all up again!
Today, we proceeded to chop up five lengths of 63mm CLS timber plus 7 lengths of 89mm CLS timber, to produce enough material to create thirteen individual rafters to build the “H” section of the roof, having seven of them cut with the usual bird’s mouth notches, a further three with half bird mouth notches and the other three just being single bottom flanges only. Then, using all the various left-over pieces, we went through them all to make 28 wide 89mm CLS diagonal noggings, a further 61 63mm diagonal noggings and loads of straight one (just over a hundred of them!). We only needed 24 straights, 9 wide 89mm diagonals and 18 narrow 63mm diagonals to do our “H” rafters, all the rest went in the garden shed for the next section “P” and “N” and so on.
We turned to the next task of slicing down a heap of webbing plywood strips to their required sizes, putting in the wall notches in each pair as we went along and also using further left-over pieces to try to recover more of the “waste”.
The day came to the conclusion with us cleaning the workshop of all the saw dust etc. and then filling up the glue dispenser bottle so it is all ready for a fresh and quick start in the morning on assembling and making these “H” nine rafters plus some four “odd” ones.

This morning, in bright sunshine but chilly air, we finished installed the last two middle rafters on the “H” section of the roof.

Then we spent the rest of the day measuring up the various sections of the roof on either sides of these middle groups of rafters on both the “H” and “P” sections. The “H” was pretty standard but the “P” had an extra O Ridge to take into account and we measured all of the positions to make sure all the sizes were known and we didn’t give ourselves any surprises. There are a total of 17 rafters on the “H” and 21 rafters on the “P” sections. These are the top few largest sections so is likely to take the whole week to prepare and manufacture for the “H” and another week for the “P” sections. We will see how we go!

P.S. Here is the picture of the P rafters we installed on Saturday (It was dark when we finished)

Today, in a quiet and chilly but with lovely sunshine, we got most of our rafters we had manufactured up and installed into the roof  structure.
The “L” section is now complete, all five rafters were done before lunch.

Then the “P” section was finished as the daylight faded away at 4pm (no picture, too dark!)
And finally, two of the four rafters for the “H” section was installed in total darkness, apart from our powerful floodlight shining down on the scene!

On Monday, we will finish off the middle portion of the “H” section and then we can measure up the necessary distances to start manufacturing the filling in set of rafters for both the “P” and “H” triangular portions, either side of the middle bit we have done today.

After repairing the Bevel Slicing machine, we proceeded to finish off the final two “L” rafters to have their bevel ends sliced in. So we now have five “L” rafters plus one odd pair of flanges (to fill in a large gap right up near the steel I-Beam end of the K Ridge) all ready.
To finish off the day, we went through the nine other rafters we had already constructed and tidied up the ends, especially the wall ends where our webbing wasn’t cut deep enough to keep clear of the noggin and the wall’s top-plate.
We have other commitments tomorrow (Friday) and we hope that Saturday will warm up and have melted all the snow and be dry so we can put up our 14 rafters we got ready!

After finishing the preparation work this morning, like filling up the glue dispenser bottle, cutting some more straight noggings as well as eight little “filler” noggings too, then collecting 14 polystyrene foam strips and finally sweeping the whole workshop, we were ready to start assembling the nine rafters in nine separate sessions.

And amazingly enough, we managed to do all nine rafters in one day! We are definitely speeding up our technique and procedures and now can turn around a long rafter in about 30 minutes on average – wow!

Tomorrow, we will look at our Bevel Slicing Machine and repair that. Also look to see where the leak in our garden shed roof is plus improve the coverings on our various timber storage stacks too. Then, we will Bevel cut the two remaining rafters and dress the nine rafters we did today to tidy them up and leave them all ready for Saturday to be installed outside.

First thing this morning, we hauled out the five “J” rafters outside and got them installed up into the roof. This cleared up some much needed space in our workshop.

We finished off the morning by finishing off converting the various templates to the new 40 degree mode.
After lunch, we started the preparation work for the “H” and “P” sections of the roof (these sections are over the Utility room and Bedroom 3 and back door, and over the Great Room respectively ). We needed 36 plywood webbing strips and 9 lengths of both the 63mm and 89mm CLS timber, all so we can make nine rafters (4 for the “H” and 5 for “P” sections).
We sliced the 40degrees ends on the webbing strips, cut down to required lengths and paired them off ready for their respective flanges. The flanges had also the 40degrees ends done (with two of the 89mm CLS having the Bird’s mouth cuts too) and all of them chopped down to their required lengths too.
We spent the remaining of the time making loads of noggings until the 18:00 “tools down” time arrived!
Tomorrow, we will proceed to make these nine rafters, hopefully all in the one day – that would be good!!

This afternoon (the morning was skipped due to other commitments), we got down to the task of slicing the bevelled ends on all the remaining rafters for the “J” and “L” sections.

We managed to do all five “J” rafters and then did three out of the five “L” rafters before our Bevel Slicing Machine developed a fault in the electrics. Oh Damn and Blast!! We took the covers off the motor and upon close inspection, there are signs of the copper wires in the windings are showing cracks in the insulations, probably caused by overheating. We realised that the motor is working very hard and getting hot so we tried to keep it cooled down by halting every now and again and let the motor run without any load to blast cool air through the motor unit. But alas, the motor still suffered, probably early on when we first started doing this task several weeks ago and perhaps not realising how hot things were getting and the damage was already done.
We will have to replace the saw module with a new one which we have now ordered off the web.
In the meantime, we carried on with the measurement of the “H” section to confirm our numbers we did last week on Saturday and we now have a better set of numbers for our spreadsheet. And finally, we started converting our various templates to the new 40degree angle as we are now entering the next stage on our roof. Tomorrow, we will start preparing the material bits and pieces to build four rafters for the “H” and five rafters for the “P” sections. Despite our trouble with the Slicing machine, we are not going to lose too much time as we can get on with these new rafters while we wait for the repairs.

We resumed our work (after a two day break) on manufacturing the remaining rafters for the “J” and “L” sections of the roof. There were 10 individual elements plus an odd one to fill in a small gap up on the “L” section near the steel I-Beam.
Half way through the task, after lunch, we went outside to measure the last set of rafters that connects to the steel I-Beam and these were on the “H” and “P” sections (at opposite ends of the house) the “H” being over the back door and Utility room + Bedroom 3 and the “P” section solely over the Great Room. We moved the scaffolding tower to each end of the building and did the measurements, ready for our spreadsheet .. it was very cold out there!
We finished the last four rafters after that, all done by 5pm and they are now curing. All ten will have their bevel ends cut on Monday and installed Tuesday.