It's been a while. I've been plodding on, with an hour here and an hour there, and solid work at the weekends. I left you last time when I was templating for the main rafter, so here is a photo of that gable in process and complete:
This was a big shoulder to cut:
The difference in thickness between the rafter and the plate has since been reduced:
That photo was taken lying on my back underneath the frame, looking up.
The "stop" on the end of the rafter is really important because it stops any tendency of the rafter to slide downhill under the weight of gravity. The same sort of feature occurs with the joint between the plate and the vertical post against the house. This time it is to accurately support the end of the plate, relieving the tenon of doing the job on its own:
On to the next job. This is to make the plate above the front screen, and then fit the posts into that. I won't bore you with photos of a standard plate and some mortices, so here is the process of fitting the posts. Firstly, I made the end two posts to the measured lengths, stood them in the sole plate, and placed the wall plate on top:
You have to remember these pieces of wood aren't straight. Therefore, I couldn't just cut all the posts to the same length. I put the outside two into place, and then used a batten to mark the distance to the shoulder for the intermediate two:
That wins the prize for the most boring photo ever posted on the internet. :lol: It does make a point, though: every piece has to be individually made, and not just cut to a pre-determined standard length. Then it was time to do trial fit:
Whilst everything was together I marked for all the peg holes in the tenons. Draw-bore pegging, as we know, involves off-setting the hole in the tenon from the hole into the mortice. Normally, to get the peg to go through the resulting smaller hole (with a lip), you put quite a point on the end of the peg so that it feeds itself through. However, these pegs are "blind". They don't penetrate through to the outside. This means that there isn't any spare room for a long point. To help ease the passage of the pegs, I therefore have to chamfer the corner of the holes in the tenons. A quick flick of the chisel does the trick:
The final job for now was to make the corner braces. I worked out what I needed, and then cut a pattern, before cutting the braces out on the bandsaw. They're only 35mm thick:
Then I cut the shoulders and the tenon cheeks, and cleaned up the curves with a spokeshave and scraper:
Using the template, I then marked out for the mortice locations. This is more complicated than it might appear, because I had decided to let the shoulders of the brace into the plate and posts:
This is so that when the everything shrinks there won't be a gap between the shoulder on the braces and the post or plate. Seeing light through a joint is never good, but here it will be backlit by a window, so even worse than normal.
I then chopped out the mortice in the normal way:
That end of the brace has a reduced tenon to miss a brace coming in at right angles, but it will be months before you get to see that. Fitting the joint together enabled me to mark out for the housing:
The only sensible way to produce an accurate new "shoulder" at a precise depth was to use a router. This surface, after all, is the one that will be doing the work if the wind tries to "rack" the completed building. There's not much meat to the side to be playing with. Anyway, it worked out neatly:
The saw cut this side of the brace is for a rebate for the windows. The brace is mounted on the raised bit just inside the glass, hence the thin timber and nearness to the edge.
Finally, I put it all together (well, excepting the middle posts). Obviously this is upside down from where it will be in the building:
