A quick re-cap. I made a pair of rafters, and did a bridle joint at the top:
The next job was to make the tie beam (if you can use the word beam for something which is only 900mm long). I tend not to make these straight:
Look at those peculiar tenons! Why would anyone make them at that sort of angle? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One, is that it makes the mortise easier, being orthodox, with right angles everywhere. The second will reveal itself as we go on:
There's your clue. These things will be a bit of decoration, and as they are tenoned into the rafters, the tenons (and mortises, obviously) have to be parallel to any others fixing to the same piece of timber, otherwise assembly is impossible:
Once the joints had been made on those funny little bits of timber I swung an arc from the point at which the rafter met the tie, and cut them to the curve. The mortises, BTW, were a pain in the neck to do being 3" deep but only just over an inch x 1-1/2". It's hard to work in the bottom when you can get no angle on the chisel.
Before packing up for the day I took a pattern from the rafters so as to be able to make the other 2 pairs, and then popped the truss up in place to see what it looked like:
It was a short day today, with a late start, then, as this build is considered performance art by most of the locals, endless conversations with passers-by. Most cyclists shout something encouraging as they go by, and a number stop for a chat. Cars do to, often with complete strangers curious as to what I am up to. One guy who stopped asked some knowledgeable questions, and then said he was a carpenter. He asked about the corner joints of the sole plate, and when I said it was a mitred bridle, he said that he'd never made one of those in his life. I imagine the carpenters who built this house originally would have made dozens before they'd finished their apprenticeships.
I can blame the most stupid cock-up in the most glaringly obvious place on the whole porch, on one such passer-by. I was listening to what he was saying as I was marking out peg hole, so wasn't really concentrating. I meant to have a vertical pair of pegs in the bridle joint at the top to the front rafter pair, but mis-read which piece was which, and ended up with them near horizontal. The "near" word is critical, too. They aren't horizontal, because the rafters aren't at 90 degrees, so they will either stay as a permanent reminder that I am a blundering incompetent buffoon, or I'll conjure up some piece of decorative something to plant over the top and hide them.