Category: Build Progress

Today we got down to assembling all the bits and pieces into nine rafters that form the last sections of roof adjoining the “A” wall. We did three this morning (in two runs) and the remaining six this afternoon (in 3 runs). We used as much of the template as possible to maximise turnaround time. Each pair (one smaller and one larger) went into the template and then each side was glued and nailed, using our squeezer and nail gun as usual.

The next job is to build a bevel-cutting saw machine that can be rotated and angled and positioned on the end of each rafter and power cut our way through all the layers of the plywood and CLS timber composite. We cannot use a standard off-the-shelf circular saw as none can angle more than 45 degrees and over half of all bevel cuts are beyond that limit, so we are having to make a temporary tool that is specifically designed to fit over the ends of these 400mm wide by 62mm thick rafters and clamped into place to allow the saw to slide across the end. The other limitation of domestic saws is the limited size of the saw blade themselves and can only cut no more than 50mm at the larger tilts. We need to do at least 100mm so we have bought a 300mm wide blade which will give us a maximum cut depth of 125mm. That is tomorrow’s job to design and build this machine!! A lovely Engineering problem – Grin!

We carried on with the preparation task for making the final Ten rafters that makes up the Roof section along the “A” wall. These ten rafters are the in-fill pieces that both goes along the Hip rafter (five for the PA diagonal travelling across the Great Room) and for the valley rafter (five for the AB diagonal stretching over the Hallway and Stairs).
We did the one odd rafter first, the A1 rafter, right in the PA corner which only has a 89mm CLS top flange (as it is so short it doesn’t have webbing or a bottom flange). We went outside with this one to double check and see how it will fit and discovered that it was rather short! We concluded that because of the subtle differences in the angles of these diagonal hip and valleys rafters against the drawings, we will need to measure the length of both the shortest and longest rafters in each of these local sections of the roof and enter the results into our spreadsheet in order to adjust for real world distances. Fortunately, we hadn’t started slicing or chopping any more of the CLS timber so we updated the spreadsheet and came back in the workshop with new numbers – phew!

We now have a pile of all the bits and pieces we will need to assemble and create our nine rafters tomorrow. They have been sorted into pairs so we can assemble two rafters in the template at the same time (the template is 6metres long and we can put in two shorter rafters) and save time on moving things around all the time.

Today, we started on the next task of creating the rafters that goes up and down the Hip and Valley diagonal beams, with each rafter getting shorter or longer, depending on which direction we are working in.
we made a measuring guide tool to help us line up where the first of the shorter rafters will sit on the diagonal beams, by projecting a side arm sticking out from the two neighbouring rafters and sliding the tool up until it rests on the hip or valley beam. This is then the correct distance apart (which is multiples of 612mm spacing). We did this for A5 rafter (in the PA corner in the Great Room) and for A18 rafter (the AB corner over the Front door extension and stairways). They came out at 4340mm and 4035mm respectively. We plugged these values into our spreadsheet and we now have the calculated lengths for the remaining rafters A4 to A1 and A19 up to A23.
The afternoon was spent on preparing the material pieces, 24 strips of the plywood, 5 lengths of 63mm CLS and 3 lengths of 89mm CLS timber. The plywood webbing were sorted out and had their 32degrees angled ends sliced off, ready for assembly. Further calculations and double checking on sizes etc. was processed, and when we resume on Wednesday, we can look at starting the assembling task and making the rafters.

This morning, we resumed the task of installing the remaining seven rafters in the current batch we have made this week. It has been a week of learning techniques, tricks, adjustments and other time saving methods and use of tools, to get our Second Stage Rafters to be created and installed as quickly as possible. We installed all 7 rafters in less than 3 hours!

We have now done 12 400mm wide rafters, each being about 5 metres long, all along the “A” wall, mostly over the Kitchen but half the Great Room too. There are a further 188 (yes that’s right! one hundred and eighty eight!!) rafters to go right around the whole house! But the calculations of how long it took to create one rafter for that given length, and how long it took to get up and installed into the roof framework, we estimate that it will be about the middle to the end of November when we got them all up! There may be time where we can speed up (because they are smaller and easier to handle) but also there may be times when we hit a snag (larger lengths in complicated positions or unforeseen obstacles) so we have to be realistic and the end of November is the more likely target. ! Phew!

This morning, we carried outside the nine rafters we finished making yesterday (and the day before too) and stored them in the middle of the house, ready for the installation job this afternoon.

We needed to make more room in the workshop so we could finish off the last two rafters in this batch and get them setting and drying overnight, this went all to plan as usual.

This afternoon, we rolled out the compressed air equipment, tools, and silicone glue etc. to start the process of installing the nine rafters on the “A” wall. We started on at the A7 position, next to the one rafter we had already up there (the A6 rafter). It didn’t quite fit in first time and after trying various adjustments and trimming, we got it into place and it got glued and nailed. But we realised that all the remaining rafters will probably have the same “problems” so we spent half an hour or so trimming and filing various parts on both ends of the rafters while they were down on the ground. The other adjustment that was needed was the slot in the cement panel on the walls and these were extended deeper so the Bird’s mouth on the rafters would fit down and clear the cement boards.
Now it was the turn of A8 rafter to go up and it almost fitted first time but for the top flange rubbing on the kerb wall around the skylight. We got out our electric belt sander and cleared away a couple of millimetres of material up on the end of the rafter. This one then got glued and nailed into place too. We took this example of how it is fitting so we applied the belt sander to the ends of the remaining 7 rafters.
Finally, A9 and A10 rafters went up and fitted first time (hurray!) but they were very tight on the wall end so more tools (club hammer and crowbar) were brought out to assist with the job – Phew!! These were also glued and nailed into place too and that was pretty much the end of the day.

It was much more fiddly than we envisioned, but hopefully, we will speed up tomorrow as we have made all those adjustments and might get the remaining seven rafters (including the two that were made today) up and installed into the roof framework.

It was simple today! it was just the task of creating more of our regular Second Stage Rafters. We did two before lunch from 11am to 1pm and then a further four more after lunch between 2pm and 6pm.

As you can see, we managed to do six today so we now have nine rafters completed, ready to be installed, hopefully tomorrow if the weather will be kind to us. We will have a movie of our rafter creation process, as soon as we get another indoor IP 5 megapixel camera!! Grin!

We also noticed we were running through the boxes of nails quite fast, so we counted how many nails we used for a rafter, which came to 300! So doing a calculation showed we need nearly 33,000 nails for all the rafters and we only have 12,000 on hand! So a quick order for another 23,000 nails was sent off.

Yesterday and today, we got going in actually creating the next stage of rafter production! But we also had to do some minor adjustment to our polystyrene foam strips because we discovered yesterday that our let-over chunk of the polystyrene foam was a little more than the 200mm wide we thought it would be. So we had to pass the couple of dozen strips through the hot wire cutting machine again to trim off a thin waste bits. Plus the other discovery was our straight internal noggins were very slightly too long and needed to be trimmed down to 248mm long so that was another hour of work to sort out that annoyance.
We made one rafter yesterday (hence how we discovered these problems!!) and this morning, we took it outside to see how it fitted.
It went in fairly well but we need to do some adjustment here too. the slot on the cement boards on the outside of the walls were not quite deep enough so that needed chiselling a bit lower. Also a fraction of the webbing was protruding and fouling onto the wall’s leg, and finally, the top end of the rafter had to have a very slight trim on the top flange to allow the whole rafter to sit into the wooden slot better.

After lunch today, we carried on creating some more rafters and changing over to use a different glue nozzle to help speed up the application of the wood glue, we managed to complete three more rafters in the 3 hours of the afternoon.

It looks like that we can do about one rafter per hour for a full size long ones (5metres in length) and we will try and get those ones we made today up and installed in the morning – weather permitting, we have strong winds forecasted for tonight!

Today, we made three templates to help us in speeding up our processes in creating the angled cut ends on the plywood webbing and also a cut-out template to draw the required outline of the webbing that needs to be removed.

We then proceeded to slice 48 strips of the plywood webbing (we brought in a further 20 strips from our outside covered storage) using the new angled template. We soon realised that it would be much faster to use the mains powered circular saw to do the job, rather than the battery powered saw!!

Next, we created a heap of straight and diagonal noggings (248mm and 292mm long respectively) using old left-over 63mm CLS timber pieces we had from when we were making the wall’s. We estimate that we will need about 300 straight ones and probably a similar number of the diagonal ones too.
Then we cut the clearance notches on a couple of the plywood strips and then we quickly made a skeleton rafter (the A6 one to be exact) to test our new clearance notches. We went outside to fit it into place and discovered small adjustments that were needed to allow the long rafter to rotate and slide into position. It fitted quite nicely length wise so that was good!
We finally finished off the day by spreading out all the rest of the left-over 63mm CLS timber pieces all under the new rain tent so that those pieces can also dry out and be more compatible and ready for gluing later on.
We are getting there and maybe tomorrow, we will have everything sorted and that we can move into production mode and create the first 11 Second Stage Rafter, specifically A6 through to A17 in quick order and have them up and installed by Wednesday or Thursday!

This morning, we tidied up the workshop by moving the huge piles of plywood webbing strips we generated a couple of days ago. They all (apart from 32 pieces) were transported back outside to their previous covered storage.

It took all morning to complete the task. In the afternoon, we spent more time to double check our calculations and analysing the real-world measurements against the spreadsheet and drawings. We took a length of 63mm CLS timber and sliced the 32 degree angled ends and took that outside to do a test fit. We now have a much fuller appreciation of what measurements are meaning what and using that newfound knowledge, we have updated our spreadsheet so it can be repeatedly used for each section around the house without having to repeat certain calculations again and again.
We are much more confidence of what is required and also we will create another template to help us slice the angled ends off the webbing plywood strips as well and that will speed up our production rate, plus also a couple of smaller templates to help mark out the area on the ends of the webbing that needs cutting away to allow for the clearance of top-plate at the bottom end and clearance for the steel I-Beam at the top end. It does indeed takes a long time and lot of preparation work before we see any finished article and it is really interesting to see how all this reflects in other situations like inside a factory somewhere in the world – grin!!