I am having a difficult time finding information on how to build a hip roof (with a 30" wide overhang) whose gutter track is level with the top of a ferrocement sill. How to tie it to the sill and conteract the outward thrust of the roof? We would like to keep the space open and not fill it with bracing and ties. I was thinking of using hammer-beams in the four corners of the house with wall posts… any ideas? Steel plates embedded in the sill at the corners and bolted to the hip rafters?

John,

Did you see the article on timber framing in Nepal (or maybe your wrote it). I don't think I saw any hips while I was roaming around Nepal. I'm not sure what you mean by sill. Do you mean the top the masonry wall in this case? If so, you could run a top timber plate over the masonry.

What size building is this? Trusses are often used to support hips, but I wouldn't mess with hammerbeams unless you really really know what you're doing. Often hips sit on a tension ring of some kind. It would all depend on the size and snow loads and so on.

And to get the gutter track level on irregular roofs, just draw an elevation view with the 2 common pitches, and graphically or mathematically make them the same height.

And if you want the overhang to be the same dimension horizontally (the soffit)(in plan view), then you have to offset the hip off the corner of the building.

Hello,

No I have seen this article. Where can I find it? In the forums?

There are a few hip roofs here but they are definitely not the norm. The sill - it's called a ring-beam in SCEB speak, or a plate in balloon framing speak. It's a ferrocement beam around the top of the wall to join all the walls and distribute any point loads above.

There are no snow loads where we live just wind loads

The way the Nepalese do it is set the rafters on the brick walls, no connections, but they have posts to support the ridge.

Since I already have a concrete ring-beam running around the top of the wall I didn't want an expensive and redundent wooden one on top of it to connect the roof. I suppose there is no other way around it? I was imagining a way to connect the rafters to the ring-beam directly.

John,

You can buy the back issue of the article by contacting the Guild office.

You probably can simply connect your roof framing to your beam, but that's way out of my league. You'll have to find a friendly engineer.

Who's SCEB? I think we'd call it a bond beam around here.

SCEB = Stabilized Compressed Earth Block. I made them myself.

An engineer… I think finding a friendly engineer here is about as likely as me taking four years of mechanical engineering. I was hoping to root one out here on the forums.

I have pretty much given up the idea of connecting the hip rafters to the concrete bond beam. Concrete is great in compression right? I need a material that excells in tension. I will attach a wood sill with bolts into the bond beam and that will solve a bunch of problems. Obvious solution but expensive.

I would like to ask you another question at this point. Some drawings of large timber hip roofs show a purlin plate under or joined to the common rafters, jack rafters and hips. But I never see posts supporting those purlin plates. It seems the function would be to reduce the outward thrust of the rafters but without posts…?

Does a hip roof have less outward thrust than a gable? Is it semi-stabilized?

I contacted the author of that article (Jeffrey Empfield), hope we can chat a bit at some point. We have some things in common.