The Strawdio

The floor is also reciprocal but in a different way. Still, every joist rests on his fellow.

First there was a bit of prep work to do. I had to fix one of the floor boards that had come away, and also add a central tyre to support the middle of the floor. Technically the central support wasn’t needed as the floor would be supported only from the base plate on the edge tyres, but an extra support never hurt anyone:

I was very fortunate to get a lot of I beams very cheap online. I filled the gaps between them using broken up pallets.

Some joints

Side view

Top view

Jack rafters fill in the gaps between the hip rafters. One difficult part of this is getting them all level. I tied paracord from one hip rafter to the next as a rough level.

Another difficulty is getting the angles correct. These timbers join the hip rafters so they are angled in two dimensions. I used an angle measurer to match the angles on the hip rafters. Every one had to be individually cut to size as nothing is standard. I cut them all using a handsaw. A cut like this that goes in two different angles is hard to cut by hand, but after a while you get the hang of it. The key is to draw the lines on the timber, then hold the timber so that both lines appear straight, and cut down that straight line.

The other tricky part was holding them in place while I attached them. I used two pieces of 2×4 recovred from pallets, to grip either side of the rafter on the roof plate, while I held the top of the rafter against the hip, and screwed it in. It often took several attempts.

Step by step:

These timbers are 10 inches by 2 inches and 10 metres long. I moved them into place on my own, cut the joints and screwed them into place. I only broke one finger.

Once the roof was up to height, the next step was to build a ring beam to go at the top of the reciprocal roof, to attach the rafters too.

One unintended consquence of raising the roof in the way that I did was that the roof didn’t go up evenly. This caused the pins holding the rafters in place to snap and the whole thing collapsed on itself

This was a tricky problem to solve. At first I tried using ratchet straps to pull the beams into place:

This really didn’t work as it just ended up binding on itself all the time. I went to sleep at night thinking about it and I had a realisation – all I needed to do was to put the strap around the ends of the beams.

When I did this and then tightened the strap it came together very quickly.

Once the roof timbers were in place it was time to raise the roof plate to the right hight to fit the bales in. One obvious question is, why not do this before the rafters were on – surely that would have been much easier.

The problem would have been that once the roof was up to the 2 meteres it needed to be at, getting the rafters on top would have been impossible without some kind of machinery. This way took longer probably but all it required was 4 bottle jacks and a lot of patience.

This was a great day. So many people came to help. This was one thing I could never have done on my own.

A very satisfying day’s work. Also it was Birch’s fourh birthday.