Thursday 1/4/21
My goodness, we struggled today trying to get the lefthand green oak hip rafters to fit. There’s nothing more complicated than a timber on a sloping diagonal. They were cut some time ago using a mock-up of the green oak ridge but we were now fitting them to the real ridge beam. We spent hours trying to work out how much we needed to cut off the green oak ridge beam to make the existing joints on the hip rafters to fit. Note the in situ calculations.
We finally plucked up enough courage to cut the ridge beam and one of the birdsmouths fell a bit short and the other at bit long. So we thought we’d try swapping over the corner ties – a bit radical – but this improved things. One birdsmouth fell perfectly while the other was just a bit short. We solved this with opposing wedges. Not ideal but this will be an interesting talking point over the coming years. A feature you might say!
We were very pleased with the way the hip rafters met on the end of the ridge beam.
From both sides.
We’re now having Easter off and reconvening on Tuesday when we will mark-up and cut the final two hips.