So my critical path, in so much as I have one, has been to get a roof up so the farmer holding my bales can get them out of his shed and into mine. With the frame functionally complete I could finally start working on the pile of roof panels.
A mate dropped around for a couple of hours to get the first pile of panels on the slab, and helped get the first ones prepped. I’d expected progress to be really slow today, and the pile of 8 panels would take more than a day – doing a new thing is usually quite slow until we get the technique down.
This….seemed to go really well, though. I had all the bits we needed, we had good, clear instructions from Bondor and we worked out the ‘good’ way to do the panels quickly – especially once my sister arrived and gave us the third pair of hands to speed things up.
Made a couple of new jigs along the way – the first was my homemade interpretation of the Bondor ‘turn-up/turn-down’ tool, which you use to bend each end of the ‘pans’ of the roof sheet up (at the top) or down (at the gutter). Two pieces of my ubiquitous plywood bolted together with a washer in the middle to give me a narrow slot worked really well.
The other was to get the slightly ridiculous tek screws (all 200mm of them!) to drill vertically, in order to hit the beams the panels were resting on. I’d thought about making a three-sided channel to guide them without getting trapped as the screw wound in, but in the end we just got a block of wood and drew a perpendicular line across it – put that against where your screw goes in, line up the screw on one axis using the face of the block and on the other using the line, and drop it in.
Ended up getting all 8 panels up by late afternoon:
which gives me about half the (enclosed) shed space under some sort of cover. Very happy with the Bondor panels so far – quality seems very good, and the lines above and below are extremely clean.
The weather forecast for tomorrow looks a bit garbage, so I’ll take that day to do some long-overdue tidying up – I’ve been hauling a wheelbarrow full of stuff up from the back shed every day, and it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Every time I need a new tool, I get it from the shed and….it ends up in the wheelbarrow to be hauled back and forth. With the frame effectively complete I’m pretty sure I don’t need to be hauling 5 boxes of structural bolts around.
Some good weather forecast later in the week means I should hopefully get most of the roof done.
