Happy New Year! 2018 was one of the best years of my life so far. I am hopeful that we will be able to continue this roll into 2019. Tina and I wish all of you a blessed and prosperous 2019! Now onto the real reason you came to this site (or open the e-mail if you are a subscriber)… To follow my tribulations as I build Tina’s Art Shack…
Progress this week was slowed by both the holidays and by weather. We had two days in the last week that I chose not to work because we had enough snow that it made the area around the Art Shack wet muddy mess, plus I did not want to get my machines all wet.
But the desert is really pretty after a light snow.
This morning, we got hit with a couple inches more, so I took today off from building as well.
The funny part of it all is a friend of ours, who grew up here and traps on a couple acres we bought last fall to the west of our fenceline, called this morning to wish us a Happy New Year. He was careful to assure us he “went out in both blizzards to check his traps and make sure his quarry did not suffer unnecessarily”. We did not have the heart to tell him: “Leroy, 25° and 2 inches of snow is a far cry from a blizzard”.
So onto the build…
The lumber arrived late last Wednesday afternoon. Of course all of the lumber arrived stacked in the exact opposite order that I would be using it. So we spent an entire day just restacking lumber into the pile for the roof trusses and the pile for the walls.
We also loaded up my cargo trailer as a mobile tool crib and brought it out and staked it down.
Next up was designing the roof trusses. Why did I do the roof trusses first instead of the walls? Because I had this beautiful concrete pad that made the perfect space to build them. Why did I build roof trusses at all instead of just ordering them? I cannot answer that question, other than to say I have never built them before and the challenge intrigued me. Dumb, dumb decision…
The first challenge was figuring out the angles and cuts for all of the parts. I want a 4/12 pitch roof. The angle for a 4/12 pitch is roughly 17° and some odd minutes. But that threw the lengths for all of the struts and racks off. After playing with the math for a while, I figured out the easiest way to get roughly what I want is to round the pitch to 17° exactly; that gives me 1/16 inch accuracy cut lengths on all of the struts and racks over a 20 foot span and makes it easier to cut the parts. I thought that would be the most difficult part, I was wrong.
The next step was to make the cutting and measuring jigs. So, I made the jigs to cut the 17° angles on the cord and the jig for cutting the angle for the struts against the rafters ( 90° – 2 x 17° I.E. – 56° degrees).
I also made a couple convenience jigs: one to find the exact center of a 2 x 4 and the other to quickly set my mitre saw to 17 °.
Cutting the parts was not too bad once I figured out the formula and clamped the cutting jig on the stock properly.
Doing up the prototype with plywood gussets was not too bad.
But building them for production as been an absolute nightmare. Framing lumber is bent and twisted all to hell. I am able to cut all of the pieces accurately in about 40 minutes for each truss. But then fitting them together tightly and nailing on the metal gussets, while trying to straighten them out requires a lot of persuasion with pipe clams.
The upside, however, is once I get the gussets nailed on both sides, they do seems to hold everything nicely in place. They also seem to be pretty strong. Once I got the first one done, I had Tina steady it vertically while stood in the middle of the 20 foot cord and jumped up and down. It did not move or even make a sound. So I am pretty happy about that.
All of the trusses I have completed so far seem to be identical (as near as I can tell). I will find out for sure when I nail the plywood for the roof on. But so far, I think they are going to be okay.
It seems to be taking about 4 1/2 hours per truss to build them. Thus far, I only have 3 trusses complete and all of the parts for the 4th cut. I have a total of 9 to make. Now if the weather would just cooperate, I might be able to make some headway.
