cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Ridge Board is Built Friday night was different. 3 or 4 hours of rapidly exchanging plastic cups of beer for red tickets. A charity thing that I was volunteering for at an outdoor concert. In retrospect, the remarkable thing is people's behavior. We went through about a dozen kegs at my station. Literally, I was serving beer from 4 different taps every second the whole time. The line never once let up. And in that whole time, not a single person was rude or unpleasant. This was at an outdoor concert which I think was actually free to get into. All sorts of people came through the line. Yuppies, college students, old people, bikers, rednecks, etc. Every single one of them was well-mannered. Even as the night went on and they were increasingly drunk, nobody was a problem. That's rather nice. My renewed faith in humanity makes the time spent well worth it. On Saturday Ida and I went to Tractor Supply to purchase, appropriately enough, tractor parts. Then I took her to get lunch and ice cream at a diner before we went home. The weather was lovely. I didn't get to do much of anything on the workshop that day since I didn't have the wood I needed. But I mowed a lot of lawn and did other chores. Played with both kids. On Sunday it rained, rained, rained. Bob and I went to the lumber yard in his truck and got some wood that morning. I got a bunch of 2x6s and some 2x4 studs. It was pretty dry inside the workshop on account of the tarps over the ceiling joists so I holed up in there all afternoon to get some stuff done. Ida came out with me and said that she wanted her own workbench. I look at the various scrap wood lying around and realized that I could knock one together pretty quick. So that was what we did. It took me maybe an hour or so to make a workbench almost identical to mine, only scaled down to her height. I measured her for it and gave it a few extra inches for her to grow. It has a shelf on the bottom for her tool box and everything. After it was finished and she went back into the house, her workbench came in handy. It was time to (finally) scarf together the ridge board for the roof. The ridge board is built out of a 12 foot long 2x6 and a 10 foot long 2x6 connected end to end. It will form what amounts to the spine of the roof. Since it was raining, I wanted to build it in a dry place. But the ridge board needs to be around 22 feet long on account of gable end over hangs while the interior of the workshop is a bit less than 18 feel long. The solution was to put Ida's little workbench in the middle of the room with one end of each piece of wood resting on it and the other ends sticking out the windows at each end. The height of the workbench is close enough to that of the windows that I only had to put a couple of 2 by scraps under the ends on the window sills to get it all level. Then I used the miter saw to cut an end of each piece of wood at a 45 degree angle. I lined the 2 pieces up end to end and pounded a pair of 12d nails at angle opposite to their union. Then to keep the joint from flexing, I took 2 pieces of 2 foot long 2x6 scrap and tacked them over the union as temporary scabs with 8 nails to a scab. Now the whole assembly acts like a single 22 foot long piece of wood. Well, more like 21.4 or something on account of the scarf joint. But whatever. Staring proudly at my creation, it occurred to me that I had no way of getting this enormous length of wood up on top of the building. The smart thing to do would have been to wait for the rain to stop and then take each piece up there along with the miter saw and build it right where I need it to be. Well that was dumb. So now I need a couple of people to come over after work and help me get this big son of a bitch up on top of the building. It's not even half so heavy as those 4x10 beams that I built last month. But those beams only needed to get about 2 or 3 feet off the ground while this ridge board has to be raised something like 12 feet. The good news is that with the ridge board I'm now back in full throttle on the construction. Weather permitting, I'll be working on my template rafter tomorrow. Once I get that first one figured out, I'll copy it and start producing them en masse. Then I get to actually frame the roof. Which will be wicked awesome. 12:41 - 2008-04-21 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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