What's Your Angle?

I cannot BELIEVE how complicated the tower roof’s framing became. Too complicated for me, anyhow. I thought I had the angles calculated, but when I started cutting the common and jack rafters, nothing fit, so it turned into all trial and error (many, many errors). There was this Heisenberg thing going on, since I couldn’t mark the notch until the end was cut, but I couldn’t estimate the end’s angles accurately without the notch being in place . . . plenty of other complications arose, too. The jack rafters had to be ripped to a narrower width, because their join to the hip rafter was otherwise too long – but that meant their top edges were no longer in the same plane as the other rafters, so their notches had to be smaller to compensate. And so on, and on, and on.

Well, at a pace of one rafter per hour, they did finally get done. Once installed, all the projecting ends had to be trimmed off evenly for the fascia. I started with the circular saw, but it was awfully tricky making neat vertical cuts while hanging like a monkey from the framing. The last ones I cut with a handsaw, with no worse accuracy than the power saw.

I just hope this was the hardest phase of the project.