cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bidness Trip I'm leaving this afternoon on an overnight trip to teach a class. I wish I could look forward to an evening in my hotel room of fucking around and watching TV (which is very novel for me), reading books, writing, and watching porn on my laptop. However, I have not taught this particular material in something like 9 months and haven't even looked at it since then. So tonight will probably consist mostly of going over my course material so that I don't look like a complete idiot tomorrow morning. Yesterday I went over to Bob's place after work and worked on that roof until dark. [Warning - construction geekery to follow in the next few paragraphs.] He and I built the remaining gable-end extension with look-out rafters and so forth. I came up with a way of strengthening the retarded, inspector's nightmare method of extending the roof on the ends that Bob chose to use. I'm going to take 2x4s and attach them to the bottoms of the top chords of the trusses, stretching from the look-out rafters all the way in to the 3rd truss. I might even let them in to the trusses a little rather than just face-nailing them. I'll use 3 or 4 on each side of each gable end. Sort of like using a set of strongbacks to stiffen sagging joists. This way the roof might have some dim chance of surviving a 60 mph wind. When I got there I found that he had already started attaching the blocking that the look-outs would be attached to, but he'd been doing it with SCREWS. Jesus H. Christ, what can he be thinking? He used screws and he failed to use the clamps I left for him to at least hold the blocking tight against the truss, so now there are 1/8" GAPS BETWEEN THE BLOCKING AND THE TRUSS. Every one of those pieces of blocking could be wiggled with my hand. The thing about screws in an application like that is that they are almost worthless. When you apply lateral force to a long piece of wood held in place with screws, the screws will generally snap. Screws are very good at resisting being pulled out along their axis and are better than nails at that. But that isn't the kind of force we have to worry about on the gable end overhangs of a roof. The issue there is UPLIFT. The wind gets under the edge of the roof and pushes up, and if screws are holding it in place then they just snap. Nails usually have more flex and are very good at resisting those lateral forces that wind on a gable end will bring to bear. This exact spot is the Achilles heel of most buildings in a wind storm. If you watch video of a building being destroyed by high winds, the real damage starts when it gets into a gable end and rips that end off by lifting up the edge of the roof and maybe pulling off the last pair of rafters. Once it has that opening, it keeps going like a can opener and the whole building gets destroyed. If there is one spot that you should absolutely be finicky about when framing a building, it is the gable ends of the roof. Bah, whatever. It isn't my barn and I'm not going to worry about it too much. The lady who is supposed to provide the deer for my class to dissect next month has not responded to my email last week about scheduling the pick-up. I'm getting worried. Without a deer that day, I would really be fucked and it would be extremely embarrassing. I've got 10 people coming down from NYC for the weekend with the expectation that they will be learning how to gut, skin, butcher and cook a medium-sized quadruped. I'll call her this evening if I get to my hotel by a reasonable hour. Since my class tomorrow (which is all financial professional stuff having nothing to do with my other classes) is finished by around 12:30 pm, I think that I'm going to look for some interesting bit of public land to go fishing at before I drive back home. I'm going to be right around the southernmost opening of the Chesapeake Bay and it would be a very interesting habitat to catch fish in. My rod and tackle are sitting in my car at all times lately and I have my fishing license in my wallet. I might go back to the Great Dismal Swamp and see about hiking in to that huge crater lake that was formed by an underground peat fire some 6,000 years ago. I'm not sure whether I'd need a canoe for that, though. 12:46 p.m. - 2010-04-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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