South Wayne Truss 2 done

All went well and truss 2 is now done. Four days to layout, cut, clamp and drill. Not bad if I do say so myself!

This time the parts were pre-finished. At the left you can see the wheel borrow full of chips that
were produced from the holes that were drilled!

Along those lines I can tell you that I did a test and drilled one of the holes through the full six layers and can tell you that it took 8 minutes and about 150 revolutions of the auger to do the job. Drilling all the holes by hand, in one truss would take over 14 hours!

The Hole Hawg does the job in about 1 minute. With all the time I saved I will spend the next 10 days in Chester, New Hampshire working on a 24 foot covered bridge at Wason's Pond.  This project is being done by the Timber Framers Guild. Should be a good time and lots of serious fun!

Puzzler - What kinds of new things will I learn in the next 10 days?
Tech Vocab - Pratt Truss

Why did I save that piece of broken mirror...?

I save a lot of "good stuff".  At the time I did not know that I was going to need a nice piece of mirror to make a bridge but I know now.

This would be a good puzzler to figure out just what is going on in the picture above, but I'll save you the trouble. The mirror is placed on the opposite side of the chord when sawing to the kerf to get a tight fitting butt joint. This way I can see how close the saw is getting to the chord piece above or below the cut without stopping. Don't want cut to deep and nick the other chord piece!

Above you can see how the butt joint has opened after the camber was put into this chord. This can be a significant gap and any load would not be transmitted evenly through a poorly fitting joint like this.

The solution?

My American pull saw! I was having a great deal of trouble with the saw binding during this process then it dawned on me. Pull the saw instead of push it. I also gave the saw a good coating of bees wax. Mirror, wax, Vise-grips, works like a charm! Tomorrow should lay on the web layers, maybe even start the inside chords.

Puzzler - What ideas can you come up with to improve the process?

Tech Vocab - Pull-saw, Vise-grips,  bees wax, Sawing to the Kerf,  Gear wrench