• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Mike's ext'n & renovation (solar panels)

No commentary..I'm too tired. Here are some snaps of work over the last few days:

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And finally, a bucket full of pegs ready for putting the roof together tomorrow:

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Looking forward to that tomorrow.
Are you going to repeat all this green oak in roof of the original part of the house?
Mark
 
Yeah, I'd hoped to have finished the woodwork by early afternoon, but was still at it at 8.30pm. Two joints on the rafter feet took nearly 3 hours to sort out. I've just fallen asleep in the bath for 20 minutes. One last big effort tomorrow and the roof should be done and dusted. There will be lots of photos.
 
the bear":3r4eww96 said:
Looking forward to that tomorrow.
Are you going to repeat all this green oak in roof of the original part of the house?
Mark

No, that will be a mix of the original timbers and some new rafters in softwood. There are already tie beams in this bit, which I'll just strip of the shiny black paint.
 
Today was the big day......raising the roof.

The first job was to fix some 100 x 50's to the top of the ridge beam, to space it the right distance down from the rafters. The alternative of having a 10" x 6" solid oak beam was just too heavy to even contemplate, and besides, this arrangement gave me a nice easy place to run some cables to a couple of light positions, which became my 2nd job of the day.

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I had decided a few days ago that trying to raise the ridge beam (don't forget, it weighs over a third of a ton) on a tower scaffold was going to be too cumbersome and unstable, and that building a purpose made structure would be safer and ultimately quicker. I designed a framework of 4x2's:

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The trick, as I have shown with previous lifts on this job, is to have the pair of fulcrums close enough to the centrepoint such that there is a large counterbalancing effect, and one simply see-saws the beam up into place. So, whilst I lifted on end, my buddy would insert a packer across the framework, and clamp it in position:

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Every 650mm, we would unbolt the redundant lower horizontal member of the framework, and bolt it in just above the beam, and then use that with cross bearers, allowing the removal of all the packing from below. A couple of times we needed to move the beam horizontally, and we did this very simply with rollers:

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The temporary tie beam had been in the way, so we moved it a couple of times, until we could get one in below the beam we were raising. The nearer you get to the top, the less you can raise it each time, because you bump the raised end of the beam onto the rafters:

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Nearly there! We did the last inch or so with acrows, which I didn't phgotograph. All in all, it took about 3 hours to raise the ridgebeam:

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If you look carefully you can see some temporary supports of 4x1 screwed to across the face of some rafters to hold the ridge beam in place. The first of the King posts went in easily, despite us fighting gravity:

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We had to put the rafters in place and held in a temporary manner before raising the tie beam. The first pair were fouled by rafters behind, so we couldn't lift them as far out of the way as we would have liked:

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We're not going to do this again. It was too unstable. Nonetheless, it worked:

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Once the see-sawing method had raised the tie beam as high as the underside of the bottom mortice, we were unable to rock it any more. I set up a fulcrum, and used a long piece of 6x2 as a lever to do the last 3" of work, then a bit of bashing here and there, and at last I was able to get some pegs in:

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There was then a certain amount of messing about to do to release the temporary supports for the rafters and lower them into there appropriate mortices, but all the joints worked fine (albeit I had forgotten to drill on of the peg holes, and so had to do it in situ. There will obviously be no element of draw-bore about that joint.

After securing the ends of the first tie beam, we moved on to the central position, set up a new working platform, and raised the King post and braces into place. This was slightly more awkward, as there were 3 joints to line up and hammer home, rather than two as per the first truss. One of the joints wouldn't co-operate, and I managed to break a peg off in the hole. Luckily, there was a second hole which pegged up easily:

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We also located the rafters, and were able to get them well out of the way this time:

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That was close of play for the day:

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We should have the roof fully erected by lunchtime tomorrow.
 
Fantastic...grreat work and loving this wip :) :eusa-clap: :eusa-dance: :obscene-drinkingbuddies:
 
Why am I inside posting in the middle of the afternoon?

Because I've finished!!! :eusa-dance: :D

You may remember that we were at the centre truss position, with the King post and two braces fixed in position, and the two rafters held temporarily in place. This meant that the next job was the raising of the tie beam. In a waking moment in the middle of the night I had come up with a scheme for raising the beam more safely than yesterday's effort. The first thing to do was to make a frame either side of the beam, so here you can see the four verticals, two to either side of the beam. I had thought about using a lever to raise the beam in 2 or 3 moves, but we decided it was safer to do it in small bites as we had done previously:

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As if by magic (or simply the lack of any intermediate photos) the beam arrived nicely at the underside of the King post tenon, I got a peg in, and we lowered the rafters into their mortices before pegging them too. That's the central truss finishe:

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The final Kingpost lifted into place easily, and I quickly pegged it. We were getting quite practised at the procedure by now, and soon had the two rafters in place, and held temporarily out of the way:

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After clearing the scaffold platform out of the way we built a quick frame around the beam as before, then, as before, raised it by rocking and packing. Remember, it is important to have enough clamps!:

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That was it. Nothing to do now other than clear up, remove all the temporary works, and take a few photos. This is the central Kingpost and truss. Not the opctagonal shape to the King post:

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This is the northernmost King Post. Note the octagonal shape to the King Post:

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Looking south:

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Looking north. Note that until the new tie beams are properly bolted into place the temporary modern pine tie beam must remain:

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Finally, the southernmost King post & truss. Now, here's a puzzle. Why is this King post square in section, and not octagonal like the other two?

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Mike G":18fhzzqe said:
Finally, the southernmost King post & truss. Now, here's a puzzle. Why is this King post square in section, and not octagonal like the other two?

If I have been paying attention then this one will be behind a wall, a shame really.
 
Beat me to it. I was going to say it will be filled in to make a wall..

Impressive progress as ever by the way.
 
Well, yeah, sort of. It is actually the front face of built in cupboards. The bedroom wall is about 700/ 750mm behind the oak. It doesn't have the chamfers/ octagonal shape because there will be doors nearly flush with the face of the oak.
 
Thanks David.

-

For those expecting an update, I am having a few days off to catch up with some drawing work, and to have a little play with a chainsaw before the birds start nesting. I'll be back to building on Monday or Tuesday.
 
Fabulous work Mike!! Looks stunning! Hat's off to you chap! :eusa-clap: :text-bravo:
 
That is some lovely looking oak work.

I am confused how these substantial beams are so structural and are also going to prevent wall spreading because it looks like they will not make direct contact with the wall plate but will be tied to their adjacent rafter. What am I missing?
 
HJ, This is all part of Mike's special way of building :lol: I keep tripping over this detail too
I think there is blockwork inner skin still to be built and that will support the roof.

There are some wall sections around waaaay back in the thread that should help clarify.

hth

Bob
 
Well, I got back to work today, although I lacked any vigour. I adjusted the oak trusses so that everything was horizontal, central, vertical etc, and screwed in some new temporary supports at the underside of the tie beams. I am waiting to borrow a friend's 90 degree drill, which is the only way I'll ever manage to drill a bolt hole in the small gap I have left between the tie beam and the adjacent rafter.

The I made a lot of this:

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And a few of these:

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OK, here's the issue:

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Mortice and tenon studs into the sole plate, and you can't then mortice & tenon them into the fixed, in situ, tie beam. At least, not without springing the floor and the roof apart by more than 75mm.

BTW, whilst we're looking at the sole plate and m&t joints, here is the one nearest the end of the plate:

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I did it like that to leave a little "meat" in the end of the timber. Otherwise, there would be a short 20 or 30mm of end-grain just waiting to split as it dries.

So, back to our "problem". I need to be able to fix the top ends of the studs into place with a joint which restrains them in all direction, including twisting, but which slides in from the back. So.....

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That is the middle one, at the point at which the two slopes in the underside of the tie beam meet. Hence the double cut to the shoulders.

I deliberately made the cut for the shoulders 2 or 3 mm higher than my mark, so that the floor and tie beam are pushing each other apart, keeping the joint tight, and allowing for at least some of the shrinkage which will occur. So, to fit the stud into place, I used a wedge and bit of 4x2 to prise things apart a bit:

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In place for marking up for the mortice part of the dovetail:

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The whole dovetail would have required the removal of a hell of a lot of wood, so I removed a part of it which didn't contribute much to the strength of the joint:

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Gauging the depth for the inner vertical face of the joint:

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.....and transferring that to the beam:

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Then, the usual bashing at a chisel with a mallet:

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I really didn't fancy getting this joint stuck. It would have made a real mess trying to get it apart again if it had jammed, so I waxed the faces which were subject to movement:

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The first fitting showed up the necessity for a little adjustment of the shoulders:

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So, after marking it carefully, I took the joint apart, and using a very sharp knife cut a line to work to:

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Then did some chiselling and paring (sorry for the out-of-focus photo):

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I then set that stud on one side (there seemed little point in doing another fitting, and then taking the joint apart again, because that takes nearly half an hour and there would be nothing to gain anyway). So, I proceeded with the next dovetail/ The back (inside a cupboard) isn't flush because the timbers are of differing sizes:

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So long as the front is flush I'll be happy:

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:D

Finally (a lot else happened today........showed 2 brickies around, 2 plumbers, and the structural engineer).....a friend showed up with an answer to this problem:

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This is a wonderful bit of kit:

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So I was able to drill all of the bolt holes for the tie beams, which will enable me to remove the temporary supports tomorrow.

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In praise of building inspectors.

Thirty years ago, when I knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about building or buildings, I was taught all the basics, inadvertently, by a local authority building inspector checking my work on the first extension I tackled. Between then and now, my knowledge has been added to by a number of sources, (least of which was a university education in Architecture), but building inspectors still remain high on the list of contributors. I have found them, invariably, to be helpful and interesting, and almost all of them have been friendly. When I have a problem with building regs in a design I am doing, I ring one of them up, and they always, but always, will help.

Today I had a visit from my building inspector, and he was very thorough, and very professional. He passed everything subject to his checking of the Structural Engineer's calculations, which is great, because he will never have been trained in mortice and tenon joints and oak pegs. What's more, he not only said what a pleasure it was to inspect something out of the ordinary, he also answered half a dozen questions I had about forthcoming parts of the job, and offered good advice on a couple of areas where I hadn't quite made up my mind. All that with a smile. Great bloke, great service............and a great result. I can now get on and insulate, and do the inner skin blockwork.
 
I quite agree Mike, I have always found BCOs to be helpful and constructive when the odd problems occur.
The low-life types are to be found in the planning department when they are seldom helpful and unwilling to suggest solutions or give opinions informally. Their approach to me has always been one of "you drawn it up, make an application and we will tell you if you can do it".

I took great delight in my last project - the workshop as it was done under PDR and there was nothing but nothing they could do or say to object - Result!

Bob
 
Apologies for the tardy posting, folks, but it has just been a question of plodding on with dovetails and so on.....none of which can be that exciting to see over and over again. I have also spent a few days sorting out a pond across the road, overgrown with willow. So, anyway, here is the bedroom oakwork finished for the time being (there will be some chunky green oak frames around the door openings in a few weeks time):

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The final oak job of this phase is downstairs: the wall between the kitchen and the lounge, adjacent to the fireplace. I'll leave you to ponder why I am using rebates (as always, plates first, then studs to follow):

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Brownie points only for those who guess the reason.
 
Yes......but not enough information.How will it help?
 
If you have panels between the uprights, these will sit or float in the rebate. As the beams shrink the floating panel will 'drop' meaning there will be no gap between the panel and the surrounding beams...... perhaps!

Steve
 
Same reasons as you did with the bressumer? To allow a thicker mortar bed under the bricks to show a normal mortar line post shrinkage?

Cheers
Mark
 
Yes, that's the right answer for the bottom plate. However, the posts will also have a rebate.
 
To tie the brickwork into the studs on either side so it doesn't just fall out?
 
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