Some of you with long memories may remember an enormous hipped roof we assembled (in 3 stages) in the workshop a some time back – here are a few reminders:
Hips and jack rafters
After myriad problems down on the building site, adding up to a full 9 months delay, we finally got to truck the timbers down to Swansea for the raising. It can be difficult, even disappointing, to break the flow from the workshop to the raising as we are always keen to “finish” the process so that we can properly move on to the next frame. Gnawing away is always the thought that the frame might not fit, or that we’ve lost some vital components somewhere amongst the piles of timber filling up the yard…..or more seriously that we’ve forgotten how it goes together!
Before we could worry too much about such trivial matters we had to worry about the rain. LOTS of it. And then some more. We’d been lucky with dry raisings for a while but now our luck had really run out. On an exposed site looking down towards a misty coastline, we took a soggy battering but had to grit our teeth and keep going as the crane was booked for the day. A couple of strategically placed temporary downpipes ensured that we occasionally received a cold spout of water down the back of the neck to keep our squelching wellies topped up to the brim.
Up and over through the mist
Somehow we survived and made slow but steady progress, assembling the 4 trusses and craning them over the top of the building to the other side through the mist and rain. The trusses were located onto the oak soleplate on the one side, and into holes cut in the masonry on the other. Four “dragon ties” at the corners provided the base for the “hips” and a beautiful internal feature.
Dragon tie with simple decorative detail
Fitting the heavy 6″ x 4″ rafters turned out to be harder and more time consuming than planned – in fact a whole day more time consuming, but on the plus side by the time we had finished, it had stopped raining long enough for us to take a few photos of our work.
Jake and Florian fitting the jacks
Huge prow ready to be glazed.
Shallow pitched truss with brace to ridge
