Category: Roof

Finished Bringing Gutters Back to Fresh Colours and All Oiled

We started the week with the continuing task of cleaning the gutters and fascia. After being exposed to the sun and weather for at least 5 months and in some areas, well over a year they are rather discoloured. We ground off the affected surface using our angle grinder with a 40 grit abrasive wheel and then the orbital sander to smooth it off somewhat. We then oiled the wood to give it the initial coating and we will then come along with our back pack tank with a battery to spray on additional coats every week or so, just a thin layer at a time.

Gutter-refurb-finfished

We did the sanding and oiling using three of our original platform modules that had been cut down so the guttering were at chest height. Occasionally, we had to spread out the platforms to reach both ends of a straight run of guttering in one go and this meant that we had to step over small gaps (about a foot) but fortunately, we had screwed edging strips on all the modules to give us tactile feedback when shuffling along, concentrating on the task, and would know that we had reached an edge.

21 April 2020
Inspecting the Gutters, Sealed the Metal Mesh Edge and Starting to clean and oil them.

We started our week on a Tuesday after having a day off for Easter. We finished off applying the black yukky mastic stuff to the top edge of the Slate Skirt and it is now done right around the whole house. We also have been moving the excess Slates from the long time storage location beside the Loke to our swimming lane, to get them out of the way and tidied up under cover. The crate of slate was slowly sinking into the ground soil and an army of nature’s creatures have been living in between the layers of slates!

Then we decided to get on with the inspection of the guttering and finish off checking the sealing of the rubber membrane at their ends. We also sealed the metal mesh edge to the front vertical part of the gutters. They are clamped down using a thin oak strip so we applied some clear silicone sealant inside the joint and screwed it all tight again.
This will stop the rain water from leaking through this joint and dripping down on to the ground. The water has a habit to cling to the metal mesh and rolling down towards the clamped joint and work its way through. Also, there is a strong possibility that the same water would catch any holes or the edge of the rubber membrane and travel backwards under the rubber and back into the gutters. We found one or two sections having rain water underneath the rubber membrane so we had to lift it up and suck out the water. The worse example of this was the “M” section and we found that the rubber edge was barely on the top of the oak vertical timber piece.

Working-on-gutters

Sealed-gutter-cap

On Wednesday afternoon, we went around the complete circuit of the house and painted behind the fascia board, making sure it was nice and neat down to the bottom of the fascia. Most of it was done when we sprayed several weeks ago but we had a mobile barrier to protect our guttering against accidental splatters.

Black-inside-of-the-fascia

We finished off the day with the excess slate moving task, finally having got all 2600 of them into our swimming lane for long-term storage.

Spare-Slates-stored-in-swimming-lane-1

Spare-Slates-stored-in-swimming-lane-2

So on Friday, we started vigorously sanding the oak gutters, first trying our belt sander but found it too heavy to hold upside down and it wasn’t quite getting into the corners plus also the flat bed design couldn’t cope with the uneven timber. So we switched over to our angle grinder with a very course 40 grit sanding disc. This was very much better at removing the grey colouring in the wood caused by exposure to sun and the weather. Our orbital sander then came along to smooth off the surfaces, with occasional hand sanding.

Gutters-after-a-year-of-weather

Sanding-the-gutters

Then we applied the timber oil treatment to the naked oak surfaces using a 4inch wide fluffy woolly roller and left it to soak in and dry.

and-after-sanding-and-oiling-1

and-after-sanding-and-oiling-2

and-after-sanding-and-oiling-3

We also oiled our first window frame too to see how it fares, see how often we will have to oil it and see how it rubs down.

H-window-oiled-1

H-window-oiled-2

Our last day, Saturday, was a rather wet day with a steady rain falling all day but we did take that opportunity and go and check the guttering to see if we had any water dripping over the gutters. The conclusion was .. much better! It was difficult to tell to which drip was rain just landing on the gutter itself or coming from water running down the mesh but we carefully watched these drips and it seems that our sealant is working! Hurray!
Also the freshly oiled surface of the gutters was resisting the water and making it bead up and run off more efficiently. Another Hurray!
So we worked indoors on the gas flame burning mechanism, a couple of electric motors to drive the rollers that will guide each larch timber plank through the charring machine. We want to establish a uniform speed so the pattern of charring is smoother and more consistent. We will experiment with deliberately changing the motor speeds and see what unusual patterns we might get.

Next week, we carry on cleaning the gutters and oiling them and then we carry on installing the other eleven windows.

18 April 2020
New Version of Larch Cladding Scorcher Machine created, Eves Got Second Coat of Black and Windows are Progressing

We started our new week in the workshop to continue developing the scorching machine. We decided to completely dismantle our first version and start over again. Using our new found knowledge and ideas, we put together a new cleaner version and got the two input and output rollers mounted and ready to be connected to drive motors (which are on order).

Larch-processor-Mk2-Day-1

Larch-processor-Mk2-Drive-rollers-with-counterweighted-pressure-roller

Then we got our four gas flame torches and connected new pieces of hose and reconnected back to the gas tank and did some burning test to see how the flame came out of each fan like spreader, to ensure that we would be burning the total width of the wood passing under the flames. But unfortunately, one of the four torches is of a different manufacturer and it behaves a little differently. Also we think that one of the fan spreaders is mixed up with the odd one out and the flame shape is different and not producing a same result.

The following day, Tuesday, had a small interruption (the septic tank was serviced and emptied), we resumed on looking at the gas torches and started analysing each flame pattern, swopping parts around, comparing the results and concluded that there are subtle differences in the manufacturer’s output. We were able to improve one of the torches by expanding the air holes in the gas mixing chamber and increased the oxygen supply to get the flame much more bluer and more powerful. But doing the same trick to the other ‘poorer’ torch didn’t have the same desired effects. Under the magnifying glass, we could see on the brass nozzle injector, that the tiny little hole (less than 0.3mm in diameter) were not consistently centred and perhaps not even straight. But we decided that three were producing a good strong flame and with the spreaders, they will do the bulk of scorching the large area of the Larch timber and the fourth torch with the weaker flame will do the angled edge instead.
So rebuilding four individual torch mounting blocks, and putting them on to a piece of plywood, we took it over to our plank moving mechanism and fixed it at an angle of about 30 degrees downwards so the flame would attack the surface of the Larch as it goes pass.

Larch-processor-with-torches-mounted

Larch-processor-Burning-torches-closeup

Larch-processor-Torch-hose-assembly

This is as much as we can do at this stage, because we need the motors we got on order, to help control the movement of the plank through the flames to get a consistent scorching effect. Our test run we did today was just by pushing the Larch through by hand and it was quite obvious in how the burnt surface varied along the plank. We also noticed that the middle torch burner wasn’t as effective as the other two neighbouring ones and therefore there was a paler strip being generated down the middle. We will have to make some adjustment later on when the motors arrives.

For the remaining of the day, after tidying up the workshop, we got back to preparing our new windows. We got all our aluminium strips in from our storage rack, and started slicing them up into all the required lengths to make up the twelve windows frames we are going to make. We made nine 1612mm lengths and twenty-four 1637mm lengths.

On the Wednesday, we discovered that the weather was very calm and actually reasonably warm (at 10°C!!) so we switched tasks and got on with doing the second coat of the black acrylic paint under our Eves. The two Porches got their first coat and that used up our second 5litre tin of paint! A quick trip out to the local DIY store and bought our third tin and used half of it going around all the Eves, making sure that we now got a solid black coverage. We even did the boxing that makes up the Downpipe Channels.

Its-black-under-the-front-porch

and-under-the-side-porch

To finish off the remaining paint, we painted our two temporary doors (the side door and the front door) and they are both now black.

The for the rest of the day, we were back in the workshop to finish slicing up the aluminium strips into their required lengths, a further nine pieces of 1707mm long, two lengths of 1097mm, two lengths of 1002mm and finally, a 900mm and 805mm pieces to finish off.
Then the drilling operation got going; making 3.5mm holes with a countersink, spaced apart by 160mm and 7mm off from the edge.

Drilling-and-countersinking-the-aluminium-strips

We got through all 48 strips, drilling over 600 holes in total. All the holes were cleaned with a deburring tool and any sharp ends were filed off.

Strips-all-drilled

with-extra-holes-at-the-ends

Making-a-lot-of-swarf

The next job was to recalibrate our template module that guides our router machines along the vertical Oak side of the window frames, putting in T slots. Our prototype window revealed that we had a slight misalignment between the left and the right sides and yes indeed, we could detect a difference to where the ‘end blocks’ were located. So we adjusted those by a tiny bit (0.75 mm or 1/32″ !!) and now the two ends are balanced.

We did all one side first, twelve of them, double checking that the timber piece went in the correct way around and proceeded to cut five T slots in each piece.
Then got all the other twelve pieces done with their T slot cut too.

Routing-keyhole-slots-in-the-window-sides

The next job was to wash all the metal strips, all 48 pieces, with hot soapy water to remove the coating of the drilling coolant solution (the kitchen got rather wet, all over the floor and worktop!) so the glue will work at maximum strength, adhering to the oak timber.

All-the-sides-with-slots-and-the-aluminium-strips

Then all the sill and header pieces were fetch from our main house where they have been waiting for this moment, got a thorough sand to remove any oxidation effects for being exposed to air for well over six months. But one of the little jobs was to glue in little triangular pieces into the headers, to block off a gap that was visible when the octagon wings were installed. We glued 24 pieces and nailed them into place and after lunch, power sanded the area to remove the glue and any excess wood to get a smooth finish.

Gluing-infils-on-the-window-headers

We also got done was to make a jig frame structure to hold and position the four elements of our window frame so that they are always right angled to each side and also aligns up from sill to header too. The basic design is done and we will add further pieces to it to hold the sill and header pieces.

Start-of-a-jig-to-assemble-the-windows

The last thing that got done for our week’s work, finally, was to fill little holes in the oak sill pieces and some of the header ones too, using a mixture of polyester resin and wood sawdust. This was shoved into the various sized knot holes and we will rub down these repairs next week.

Filling-some-surface-defects-in-the-Oak-sills

It was a good week of work with only one afternoon of interruption so we got a lot done. Next week, hopefully, will be another good week and we should get our twelve window frames created.

7 March 2020
Performed Site Tidy-up and Maintenance plus Preparation and Spraying Black Paint Under the Eves

After our conclusion of the slates on the roof (the front porch section) on Monday, we finished dismantling of all the remaining platform modules apart from two full height modules that we managed to move inside the house and a further three modules were cut down to provide a new lower working platforms.

Truncated-platforms

We then repaired and completely replaced the covering over the swimming lane storage area. The old tarpaulin that has fallen apart due to long exposure under the power of the sun. We also removed all the old wet hardboard material and chucked them up to our fire pile. Using the old plywood sheets that were the walking surface of the platform modules, we used eight of them to recover the swimming lane, also using a series of the narrow strips to fill in the gap at the front of the roof too. Finally, we recycled two very large tarpaulin off-pieces which was 14metres long by 3metres wide and draped it over the new roof surface, having it folded over to form a double layer. Everything was tied down with pieces of oak strips (from our burn pile) and stapled into place.

The-recovered-swimming-lane-store-1

The-recovered-swimming-lane-store-2

The rest of the week was spent on preparing the eves, removing sticking through nails and removing the last of excess brown rubber glue material around the back of the fascia and sanding it down smooth. Then we got out our new paint sprayer we bought in the Summer, set it up, with water ready to practice spraying only to discover that it didn’t work. There was no suction into the inlet tube. This is the second time this fault occurred as it happened when be bought it but we exchanged it for a new one, which we tested it with water back then. So we contacted the retailer and they said, take it back to the shop and get your full refund. I am glad that we found the receipt because the till insisted that the product only costs £70 but our receipt says £180! The store manager had to override the till so we got all our money back!
We then found another model which was nearly double the price and went to buy that one instead. We tested that and after a little false start, we got it working with emulsion paint.
By this time, the day was over and the following day was wet so we didn’t get to spray the under side of the eves until Saturday.
The black acrylic paint we are using is very very thick and dense, even after diluting it by 30% as instructed on the tin, the paint still wouldn’t spray through the nozzle. So we had to dilute it by a further 10% before it got going. The diluted paint was still very thick like thick custard so this acrylic paint is amazingly heavy for external surfaces (it’s made for barns etc).
The other piece of equipment we made was a protective shield to stop any splatter reaching the guttering. We just wanted to spray behind the fascia and up the roof board and the rafters coming out from the walls.
This shield was put on legs so we could prop it up against the fascia edge, but also we mounted 5 little LED flood lamps to help brighten up inside the eves.
We started around next to the conservatory at the front of the house and worked our way along the front.
But after a short while, the initial litre of paint we put into the hopper was gone and we had only done a few metres. We did realise that by spraying the paint, it uses it up more quickly, giving the surface a thicker finish, but not that quickly! So we diluted the paint by another 10% and got on with the task, hoping that we will get a fair way around the whole 75 metres of eves!
And .. we actually got back to the beginning but only just! We do need to buy more paint anyway because the two porches with their under surfaces disappearing high up to a point and we need to get up on a platform module to give us the reach and finish off the last bit. It also looks like some of the rafters need a second coat.

Eaves-painted-black-1

Eaves-painted-black-2

We will get that done next week and then we will start on the task of putting up the wall cladding.

7 December 2019
Roof Section C Complete

On this very chilly Monday morning, and a bit of the afternoon too, we finished off putting slates on the last section of roof, the “C” section which is our front porch roof facing our Loke. Another 100 slates went up, followed by about 80 slates for the flashing up the two hips.

C-roof-complete

This concludes the task of putting the roof on. We had a quick count of the remaining slates we got left which turns out to be about 3000 slates and 70 wide slates.

The-3000-slates-left-over

and-the-70-left-over-large-slates

We received 18360 slates last October so that means we have put up over 15000 slates, including 640 wide slates, stretched over an area of 360 square metres.

We generated a full ton bag of waste pieces

The-waste-slate

So that needs to be processed somewhere and somehow. We may phone around to see if anyone wants bits of slates for garden paths or something.

This means that the whole roof is now complete at the beginning of December 2019. We started the job of constructing the roof way back in July 2017! with putting up the kerb and rafter support blocks. Then getting on with the job of creating each and every single rafter.
It is by far the most complicated part of the building project we had to do and hopefully, the rest of the build will be just a tad bit easier!! (and quicker!!!!)

2 December 2019
Sealing the Roof boards to Walls and Cleaning the Eves

After finishing dismantling the excess platform modules and the lift hoist shaft, we got on with the task of preparing the Eves, ready to be painted. But the week saw quite a lot of disruptions to our work schedule.

But The first job was to spray PU foam using our gun foam kit and climb up inside the house to the top of the walls and seal the gap between the cement wall boards and the roof boards also seal the rafters where they go through the wall.

Sealing-wall-to-roof-with-foam

Meanwhile, the logo plus name banner design going across our Front Porch, on the outward facing portion of the roof, namely our “C” section that isn’t done yet, is coming along. We have been doing test runs on cutting certain portions of the rose and leaf designs into the slates and filling it in with coloured resin and seeing how it comes out.

Slate house name banner design

We have been building various tools and jigs to help us in selecting and preparing the slates, for example, finding nice flat ones of a reasonable thickness.

But in light of our tests, we have decided that it was taking too long to arrive at a final solution. We want to do more Research and Development and we didn’t want to rush this stage and then regret it later on. We will make the design slowly and install it when the house is (nearly) complete!

So on Saturday, we spent all day putting up over 300 slates across a further 13 rows to add to the existing first row we did a couple of weeks ago.

C-Half-done

We are about half way up the height of the C roof section but only about 120 slates to go to finish it off and then nail up the flashing slates and we are all done. We will come back when we are ready with the banner logo design and swop out the necessary slates for the new ones.
This means that we can dismantle the final five platform modules and tidy up everything along the front of our house so it looks more respectful. We will keep the component parts of these platform modules so we can rebuild some so we can gain access to the “C” roof again. We would only need two of them (or even just one) as our house banner is currently only 1600mm long and 350mm high.

30 November 2019
House Banner Design Progresses and Dismantling of Platform Modules

We are working on a design for a house banner, located over our front door porch facing our Loke. We want to cut the design into our slates and then fill it with various coloured epoxy resin to form a picture of a rose or two and our house name. The tricky bit is generating the necessary instructions to send to the milling machine that will slice into the surface of each slate by about 2mm. We have already bought the epoxy resin plus a series of tough UV stable colours (like Iron Oxide for the rusty red colour, aluminium powder for the silver grey, chromium oxide for the green and titanium dioxide for the white etc. )
The whole design won’t be to big or too bold, just enough so our house will have something to identify itself to visitors!
The work on this has been patchy when the weather was yukky and we couldn’t work on the roof, but since we have finished the main part of the roof on Thursday and the tidy up job is interrupted by more rainy weather, we have been working much more on this task like all day Saturday.

The other task that was done this week, from Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, is to start dismantling the dozen platform modules we have been using for the last 18 months. We will not get rid of all of them, partly because we still got the “C” porch roof to complete, but also we realised that some of the better looking modules could be used for internal functions like reaching the ceilings in various rooms when we are decorating etc. But for now, we have dismantled four modules completely and making a stack of “legs” in our swimming lane.

Pile-of-platform-legs

And we adapted three other modules by slicing off 900mm off the legs to form set of working platforms to enable us to prepare the Eves (ready for painting) and finish off rubbing the gutters and seal the metal mesh coverings.

Truncated-platforms

We will also dismantled the lift shaft as we don’t need that any more and we have an odd sixteen foot long platform module that was our mobile platform we had last year and that will dismantled that too.
With winter coming, we will work more and more in the workshop on our windows and assemble them together and get them all ready for installation etc.

23 November 2019
Roof Section H Complete!

We start the week with the left-over task of moving the Larch Timber inside our house to get it under cover. It was two and a half tons of wood to shift!! See Larch Timber Arrives.

But over the next couple of half day sessions, two afternoons (Monday and Tuesday) and one morning (Thursday) we got the remaining two hundred slates up on the “H” section of the roof, including doing the hip where we had to use our long extension ladder to climb up the roof to reach each slate meeting the hip edge. It was very fiddly because of the ladder, having to lean out and having to cut every slate with an angled shape. This also includes putting up the flashing slates as we went along.

That concludes the “H” roof.

Roof-slating-Rear-Right

Roof-slating-Rear-left

Roof-slating-Front-left

Roof-slating-Front-Right

We have finally reached right back to where we started eight months ago. The only small section left to do is over the front porch where we are designing a logo banner that will be cut into the slate surface itself and filled in with various coloured epoxy resins. This is the very last section of the whole roof, a further 500 slates.

21 November 2019
Sections F, G Finished and H Nearly done !

We resumed work on our roof, continuing with the task of putting up the flashing slates up the “F” Porch roof section and then started doing the “G” little section on the side of the porch section. This narrow strip is very very fiddly, having to work on both the valley and the hip and only four standard slates in between. It took well over a day to complete it, most of Monday and Tuesday morning.

G-Slating-complete

On Wednesday, we eagerly got started on the last section of roof, the “H” section, and got the valley done, which was slow because of having to cut on every row special slates to fill in the angle. But once that was finished, we then could speed up putting slates in strips of three slate wide and we got about 350 slates done in total.

Thursday was a very wet day so we were going to work in the workshop but we had a sudden phone call from the delivery driver to say, “I’m ten minutes away with your Larch timber” and we weren’t expecting it! See Larch Timber Arrives.

We didn’t get back to our roof until Saturday. We managed to do another 300 slates and we are now about two thirds done on the very last bit of roof, the “H” section.

Slating-at-the-end-of-the-week

We should get the last bit done on the new week including the tricky bit of scaling up and down the ladder to reach the last few slates!

16 November 2019
Section F, G and H Gets Attention – At Last!

Monday saw the start of a new period in our work, the clock had gone back at the weekend and we have lost an hour of work in the afternoon so we decided to shift our work day to start at 9am instead of 10am and finish at 5pm when it gets dark instead of 6pm.
We got on with putting the rubber liners in the three gutters for section ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’, all stuck down. Mind you, we had to dry the gutters out first beforehand, with several towels and a heat gun running at 500°C!! The two ends of each rubber liner was stuck down on to the fibre-glass resined corners of the guttering with contact glue as we have done all the while and so finally, we have done the very last three corners.
The last little task was to put up the valley membrane and wooden counter battens, ready to support and hold the grey glass-fibre valley trough.

Tuesday and Wednesday, we got all the breathable membrane up along with their counter vertical battens to hold it down, plus some widely spaced out tile battens so we could climb up and down easily. The last job before it got dark was to nail all the flashing battens on the Hips and Ridges, 4 hips and 1 ridge sections.
With these last three sections of roof (‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’) done, this means that we now have at last, a completely waterproof roof right across the whole building!

Thursday was a good day, still chilly but with sunny intervals. Firstly, we put up the spacers up on the kerb of the Skylight and stapled on the rubber strip ready for the slates and the aluminium protective strip to go up. Then we managed to get all the rubber membrane up on the flashing battens, followed by the OSB bull-nose strips and covered with the glass-fibre ribbon.
And then coated it in two layers of resin to produce our bull nose protection to divert the rain water away from the joints between the roof sections. All done before the forecast of rain arriving in the early morning hours of Friday. This was the last of this type of task, no more glass-fibre and resin out on the roof or gutters… all done now!

Hip-Flashing-for-FG-H-finished

Friday was an alternative day of meetings and other commitments [It also rained a bit].

Saturday was rather wet and we only managed to do a couple of hours on the roof, putting up some tile battens and instead worked in the workshop making a sound reducing cabinet for our little CNC milling machine.

Monday was a slow start because of another appointment but we did work in the afternoon on the roof and got all of ‘F’ and half of ‘H’ done with the tile battens. When it got dark (at 5pm), we continued in the workshop to continue with our cabinet.

Tuesday was a nice day, well almost a nice day until the gentle showery weather arrived late in the afternoon. We got all the tile battens up, we put up the first section of trough in up the valley and cut the top smaller section to fit and did the necessaries to slice off the bull nose and then glass-fibre and resin the hole to hold the rain water in.

We also started putting on the metal mesh along the guttering.

Wednesday saw the completion of the mesh over the guttering along the ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’ sections. We now have fully finished all the guttering right around the whole house. We only just made it and we had one 300mm strip left over from an original roll of metal mesh 900mm wide by 25metres long.

Mesh-on-gutters-complete

The afternoon task was to replace the first section of the skylight kerb we did back in March where we had originally put up slate pieces to protect the rubber membrane and we had decided to switch over to the better looking aluminium strip instead. So we had to break off the slates, reposition the spacers to align with the 2metre strips and then nail on the replacement pieces (all done whilst sitting on the skylight working between our legs). We also got the last section all done on the end of the skylight including the support rods for the safety wire.

Thursday, we got the safety wire strung up on all the support rods, on each side of the skylight. We did this by shuffling sideways on the windows of the skylight and leaning down to deal with the stainless steel wire. Each wire, four of them, one for each side of the kerb, was clamped into place and then tightened up until the wire was good and solid, with a minimum slack in the length, ready for when we clip on a ladder or a safety harness to enable us to service the skylight or roof.

Safety-Wire-along-IM

Safety-Wire-along-H

Safety-Wire-tensioning-buckle

Friday we got the preparations all done for the last three sections of roof, namely ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’, marking up where the initial hook nails goes for the first line of slates under the metal mesh, before folding the mesh down on top of the batten. We also projected a vertical line up the ‘H’ roof and then marked off the beginnings of each batten so we can be assured that all the slates on each row will align up, all nice and neat.
Then spent the rest of the morning and afternoon, putting up the last hundred or so slates on the ‘E’ roof we left unfinished because we didn’t have easy access (and safe) to lean over the hips and ridges to get them in.

Mesh-and-bottom-row-of-hooks-on-H

Saturday’s work got the flashing slates done on the ‘E’ section and then the whole of the ‘F’ section was completed too except for the flashing slates on the right hand side.

E-Slating-Finished

F-slating-done-almost

Next week will get the ‘G’ roof section done and hopefully most, and perhaps get all, of the ‘H’ section finished too.

9 November 2019