We finally got the confluence of me being home for a few days and getting some decent weather.  So I was finally able to spend 2 days out getting some of the walls framed.

The outside dimensions of the Art Shack are going to be 11 by 20.  So I decided to frame the walls in 10 foot sections to make it easier to stand the walls.  It means I am going to have far more studs than I need for the weight the walls are carrying, but hopefully, it will be much easier to assemble them together and get it square and plumb.

I was also pretty pleased that I only had one section that was out of square by more than an inch.  I was able to get that rectified by making a 15 foot pipe clamp and squeezing it square.  All of the others were within a 1/4 inch of square on assembly.  So I was able to true those up with just a couple blows from a hammer.

I only have 1 more 10 foot section of the front wall of the shack to frame, then we will be ready to stand them and get some OSB sheathing on to help hold everything nice and tight and square, so we can set the trusses.

My original plan was to not put the headers in above the door and windows until after the walls were standing.  Unfortunately, the way the math worked out on the studs, I had to put the headers in while building the walls.  That means these suckers are HEAVY!  I went with 3 2X10’s for headers.  Yes, that is WAY overbuilt, but it should be solid.

I also finally got the material for building the front porch.  I want the porch on the Art Shack to match the style of the porch on the house.  So I had to order some crazy big material.

The one on the bottom is a 6X10 by 12 feet long and let me tell you, that baby is heavy!  Cutting that one is definitely going to be a measure 3 times and cut once.

Next up is to get the last section of the front wall framed, then we will get them stood, squared and fixed permanently to the concrete pad.  Once that is done, it should get decidedly easier, not less physical, but definitely easier.

So, hopefully by my next installment, we will be working in 3 dimensions!

We had several more days this week with snow and/or rain.  That means a LOT of mud at my work area!

When the work area is covered in 3 inches of red sticky mud, it is just not worth trying to work.  So my progress has been painfully slow.

However, I was able to get the parts for all of the trusses cut and all but one of them nailed together.

Building the trusses turned out to be a lot more challenging than I thought it would be due to the fact that most of the 2 X 4’s had a bad case of noodle-wood.  That meant trying to pull everything straight with pipe clamps before nailing them.  I am pretty happy that I was able to get them mostly flat and true eventually, but it was a lot more work than I expected.

There is one truss that the joint where rafter and the cord meet is off by 1/8 inch on one side.  But I will make sure to use that truss in the middle and if necessary, use a cheater piece if it does not look true when I nail the facia to the eve.

Then I did a really stupid thing.

I was cutting the angles on a pair of struts.  Because the angles on struts are too steep to be cut on my mitre saw (17° and 56°), I have to cut them by hand with a circular saw.  Somehow, I let the cord for the circular saw get caught in the blade and this was the result.

I have had my Skilsaw for almost 30 years and it is one of my favorite tools.

Fortunately, I am a firm believer in the adage: “Two is one and one is none”.  So I do have a backup circular saw.  In this case it is my dad’s old Craftsman saw.  I was able to just change the blade from my Skilsaw to the Craftsman and keep going.

But I do see why my dad never derived any enjoyment from woodworking or building things.  What a big, heavy, clunky, underpowered piece of crap that saw is!  At least I was able to use it to get the rest of my parts cut.

And with today being another rainy muddy mess outside, I was able to fix my Skilsaw so I will have my friend back for the rest of the build.

Next week I will start framing the walls.  So I broke down and bought myself a belated Christmas present – A Porter Cable Framing Nailer.  It will drive nails from 2 inches up to 3 1/2 inches and should work nicely for framing the shack as well as nailing on the sheathing and maybe even the siding.

The nails for it come in a strip that looks like a stripper clip.

And what is that switch just below the safety by the trigger?

That would be the select-fire switch!  That’s right boys and girls, this baby goes full-auto and I did not even have to present I.D. or pass a background check to buy it!

Happy New Year!  2018 was one of the best years of my life so far.  I am hopeful that we will be able to continue this roll into 2019.  Tina and I wish all of you a blessed and prosperous 2019!  Now onto the real reason you came to this site (or open the e-mail if you are a subscriber)…  To follow my tribulations as I build Tina’s Art Shack…

Progress this week was slowed by both the holidays and by weather.  We had two days in the last week that I chose not to work because we had enough snow that it made the area around the Art Shack wet muddy mess, plus I did not want to get my machines all wet.

But the desert is really pretty after a light snow.

This morning, we got hit with a couple inches more, so I took today off from building as well.

The funny part of it all is a friend of ours, who grew up here and traps on a couple acres we bought last fall to the west of our fenceline, called this morning to wish us a Happy New Year.  He was careful to assure us he “went out in both blizzards to check his traps and make sure his quarry did not suffer unnecessarily”.  We did not have the heart to tell him: “Leroy,  25° and 2 inches of snow is a far cry from a blizzard”.

So onto the build…

The lumber arrived late last Wednesday afternoon.  Of course all of the lumber arrived stacked in the exact opposite order that I would be using it.  So we spent an entire day just restacking lumber into the pile for the roof trusses and the pile for the walls.

We also loaded up my cargo trailer as a mobile tool crib and brought it out and staked it down.

Next up was designing the roof trusses.  Why did I do the roof trusses first instead of the walls?  Because I had this beautiful concrete pad that made the perfect space to build them.  Why did I build roof trusses at all instead of just ordering them?  I cannot answer that question, other than to say I have never built them before and the challenge intrigued me.  Dumb, dumb decision…

The first challenge was figuring out the angles and cuts for all of the parts.  I want a 4/12 pitch roof.  The angle for a 4/12 pitch is roughly 17° and some odd minutes.  But that threw the lengths for all of the struts and racks off.  After playing with the math for a while, I figured out the easiest way to get roughly what I want is to round the pitch to 17° exactly; that gives me 1/16 inch accuracy cut lengths on all of the struts and racks over a 20 foot span and makes it easier to cut the parts.  I thought that would be the most difficult part, I was wrong.

The next step was to make the cutting and measuring jigs.  So, I made the jigs to cut the 17° angles on the cord and the jig for cutting the angle for the struts against the rafters ( 90° – 2 x 17° I.E. – 56° degrees).

I also made a couple convenience jigs: one to find the exact center of a 2 x 4 and the other to quickly set my mitre saw to 17 °.

Cutting the parts was not too bad once I figured out the formula and clamped the cutting jig on the stock properly.

Doing up the prototype with plywood gussets was not too bad.

But building them for production as been an absolute nightmare.  Framing lumber is bent and twisted all to hell.  I am able to cut all of the pieces accurately in about 40 minutes for each truss.  But then fitting them together tightly and nailing on the metal gussets, while trying to straighten them out requires a lot of persuasion with pipe clams.

The upside, however, is once I get the gussets nailed on both sides, they do seems to hold everything nicely in place.  They also seem to be pretty strong.  Once I got the first one done, I had Tina steady it vertically while stood in the middle of the 20 foot cord and jumped up and down.  It did not move or even make a sound.  So I am pretty happy about that.

All of the trusses I have completed so far seem to be identical (as near as I can tell).  I will find out for sure when I nail the plywood for the roof on.  But so far, I think they are going to be okay.

It seems to be taking about 4 1/2 hours per truss to build them.  Thus far, I only have 3 trusses complete and all of the parts for the 4th cut.  I have a total of 9 to make.  Now if the weather would just cooperate, I might be able to make some headway.