Support beams and pergola beginning
Another weekend was marked by the continuation of work. This time in addition to Tomek, the senior of the Mrugalski family - Tadeusz - took part in the work. Thanks to his invaluable experience, we managed to solve several problems, significantly pushed forward the construction of the building skeleton. And Tomek learned a few tricks.
Arms and legs, or something about stability.
The built skeleton of the building appears to be stable. When trying to move it by hand, the structure does not bend, not even by millimeters. However, this may be a somewhat illusory impression. During a windstorm, the force generated can be much greater than the capabilities of one man. Here, the not-insignificant force acting from the side, which in the worst case can lead to the deformation of the skeleton into the shape of a parallelogram and ultimately topple the whole building.
In order to protect against this phenomenon, so-called shocks are used, i.e. diagonal beams. Here it is worth mentioning that such beams running from the vertical element upwards are called arms, while those running downward legs. At least that’s the case in Polish, not sure if this translation holds in English. In the case of the Borówka, we decided that only the arms are needed, since the bottoms of the columns are well embedded in the bases, which are in turn are solidly fixed.
The preparation of the arms was quite troublesome. The biggest difficulty was the need to cut the beams at a 45-degree angle. The important thing here is that the angle had to be precisely maintained. Otherwise, the contact of the shoot with the beam or horizontal element would be poor, which would undermine its usefulness.
In order to make cutting easier, a large circular saw was purchased with a cutting depth of 85mm cutting depth. Compared to typical saws with a depth of 45mm, this is a considerable leap. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of several drawbacks. First of all such a saw is twice as heavy - 8kg compared to a regular one, which weighs 4kg - making it much more bulky. Another feature is power. In order to sensibly turn such a large blade, the saw has 2400W of power. The resulting two mundane observations. First, it is damn powerful and hard to to hold it in hands sometimes when it decides it’s time to start jerking or wobble, such as when cutting a cutting a knot. Second, 2400W is a tad too much for the workshop-installed 10A fuse. Well, a quick upgrade to 16 amps did the trick. It’s a good thing that Tadek worked as an electrical switchbox designer for half his life. Unbolting the switchbox, replacing the fuse with a larger one and screwing it back took maybe 3 minutes….
Initial plans called for between 20 and 38 beams. We quickly confronted them with reality and settled at 10. The preparation process looked like this:
The beams are mounted with Torx (carpentry screws), for screwing of which you need TORX-type bits are needed to screw them in. Fortunately, Tadek hinted that along with two boxes of screws to buy bits as well.
The challenge was to get a 45-degree angle. Fortunately, the planer came in handy again. After a few hours, the result of assembling the shoots looked like this:
Monstrous heat was pouring from the sky. Therefore, we decided to take a little shortcut and will mount the stays without painting. The only painted beams are those that touch the existing elements.
Pergola - step 1
The next milestone was the preparation of the elements (cutting out the pillars, relocating, planing, painting and cutting) the missing elements of the pergola. Finally around 5:30 pm, we managed to set the pillars upright and put a horizontal plank, on which the carts holding the roof will be driven in the future. Unfortunately, we noticed to our horror that the pillars stand unevenly and are quite a lot offset from the previous pillars.
Anyway, I am proud of this achievement. The total length of the rail is almost 12m! It seems to me that the pillars and their attachment at the bottom are a bit wobbly, but in case of such problems it is rather an an advantage. The topic is to be covered next time.
Tool park
Several new tools have appeared:
- 3x8 ladder
- 3x8 long ladder
- carpenter’s angle (fixed angle of 45 degrees)
- carpenter’s bevel (adjustable)
- circular saw 2400W Toya, cutting up to 85mm
Summary
This weekend was extremely active. We managed to gain valuable experience and moved the construction of the framework forward quite a lot.
