We have all the stairway posts up and now it was time to install the tie beams, knee braces, and base posts for the bastard valley systems.
The floating knee brace worked great for installing the base post, btw. We had discussed putting the whole bent together and flying it as a whole, and we may do that when we have a crane at our disposal, but, since we have an old grad-all in the yard, we had to keep weight and size to a minimum. Everything is clicking together nicely, especially since the timbers sat around for a couple of months after cutting.
More posts going up, as well as the two ridges that we need installed before we can drop in the bastard valleys. It's starting to look like a forest of trees, now, and it is great to finally go vertical with the frame.
The first bastard valley is installed! After months of cutting, off of math, in the shop, and then weeks cutting posts into the floor, it was very gratifying to watch the bastard drop in the slick as can be, sitting perfectly on all 5 bearing points. THe whole system, when we checked elevations, was within 1/4", how sweet is that?
We spent all day, yesterday, releveling the floor for rafter scribing. You would be amazed at how much frost heave can move a building. It sure makes it obvious why we put our footers below frost line.
Now that the two bastard valleys have been installed (and sitting just as pretty as you please), we could install the rest of the ridges that go out to the two gable walls by the kitchen and the master bedroom.
I just completed a ray-traced animation of the SketchUp model of the Hollander house we are currently fabricating. I used a mac specific software called Cheetah3D for the rendering and it took my very powerful computer 5 days to render the 8700 frames, and that is without soft shadows.
We now have all of the rafters up in space and ready for scribing. As the rafters sit in housings on the plates, notch into the ridges, and half lap each other, precision is of the upmost importance, as you can well imagine. Lots of double checking ourselves before the actual scribing. I go into more detail on my blog about how we actually set the rafters in space, if anyone is interested.
And here are all of the rafters cut into their final positions.
It may be a while before I do another ridge/rafter configuration like this as it is really fussy to get right. Since each rafter cuts into the ridge and half laps the rafter coming from the other side, any deviation from perfect causes gaps all over the place. And the two half lap shoulders have to be absolutely in the right place or the everything goes to heck.
Of course, this just means that double checking becomes even more important, especially since the whole structure is sitting on temporary post bases and is still moving around as the ground finally dries out from winter and stops heaving from the frost. We were, in the middle of winter, seeing various bearing points change by over 1/2" a DAY!!! Talk about chasing and angry cat.
As may not be obvious from the video, this system ended up unbelievably tight and we had no deviations from theo, anywhere, of more than 1/4". Booyah!