Cutting lay boards and jack rafters. (roofing in the UK)

hello everyone so this is just a quick message uh before the video actually comes i've completed the video now and edited it and what it does look in a few places like it's a little bit russian that's because it was um from the time i got my son to film it for me uh to the time we had to stop work um i only had about an hour and a half to do the whole video we're in a residential area and we can't work at the weekends past a certain time so it was a video that i really wanted to do and i think my son has done a really good job of filming it for me had i had to film it on my own i don't think i'd have been able to do it and it was a video that i wanted to do so it is half an hour 30 minutes which is a long slog for a youtube video which i understand but i didn't want to split it up into smaller videos because i think it's better to just be all in one go so here it comes and you know i hope you find of interest hello everyone so in today's video um back on a bungalow i put the roof trusses on yesterday and basically what this bungalow has it's got a run of uh trusses that go in one direction and then it's got a small another run of trusses that go a 90 degree to that now what we do to join these two roofs together is we have to put a piece of ridge board through and then that what that does is it forms two valleys now there's different ways of forming the valleys if this was a more habitable space if i had a room in it these valleys would be formed with a valley rafter but in this case where everything is above ceiling line and these two rooms will need to sit together using labors so what i'm going to show you quickly today and this is a perfect roof to show you this because it's quite small and this would be typical even if the roof was much bigger and this is how i'm going to join this roof into this one um using a ridge and lay boards so the first thing that we've got to do is put our ridge through from this roof into this one so i've got my piece of bridge board here which is 146 for 46 and what i need to do is temporarily support it on this roof here now what i've done is i've split and if you come in here and this is the center point of this roof i've come half of the thickness of my 46 mil ridge either side and put a line there just to help me now again because i'm working on my own i put a little piece of timber in here which then this ridge board will just sit on so what we need to do now is put a level on top of here to get a level line onto this roof right so um i'm going to put my ridge on and simply rest it on the tab that i've put on and if you note that this part of the ridge here is in the same line as this part of the roof and because that is the plane of the roof we don't want to bring it up so that this is level with the top because then this shoulder would be wrong so what i'm going to do here and we're quite fortunate in this in this instance that this truss this truss here is not a million miles off the line with here so we can just put that piece of ridge board on hold it tight to this truss here and then simply put our level on and grab my pencil and just bring that up until this reads level and then we can put a mark here and then that will be the top top level mark of our ridge so now what i'm going to do we need something to put this ridge board on so what i'm going to do is cut possibly one or two noggins in here and then the only other job i've got to do is take the seat cut of this roof and put it on this ridge and then we can fit that ridge in okay so we've got our ridge and now what we've got to do is cut this c cup to lay onto these two noggins i put on now this cut did we know this is level so basically this cut would be the seat cut of the of this roof so what we're going to do to find that i mean i know what the picture this roof is but let's say i didn't what i'm gonna do is get my level and i'm simply going to level a line onto this rafter cord here and then whatever roofing square you have be it um an adjustable one or a framing square with a fence on it or just sliding bevels like i used for many many years and you just set it now to this angle here and then we can run that onto the ridge so the square that i use is my bit of my go-to square is this 12-inch stanley adjustable roofing square i find it a great bit of kit and for some reason in their infinite wisdom um stanley don't make this square anymore but anyway it's uh it's a fantastic bit of kit and it's got an edge that you mark your seat cuts along and an edge that you mark your plum cuts along so what i'm going to do in this instance i'm just going to set the the bit that says mark c cuts along this edge and so i simply line that up with my seat cut which is there and then a simple case of locking off this thumb screw and now i've got my seat cup set so now we can transfer this mark onto our ridge cut it and then we can fit the ridge right so we're almost ready to cut our ridge we've got our c cut we've put our uh noggins in here and um so what we need to do now is go back to the level mark that we put on earlier which if you see is just here so we said that this was slightly offset to the center point of the ridge so i've just pulled that line across a little bit so now what we need to do is we need to measure between this mark here and across to here and that will give us the measurement of our ridge so i'll just do that it's going to be easier for me and again if this was a bigger ridge i would have to have someone to help me but in this case it's quite easy so i put my tape on the mark that end and then i can simply measure it off to this end and in this case it's absolutely bang on 1.9 meters right so this is our bit of ridge and i've got a nice square cut that end so i'll pull it down and we've got a 1.9 meter mark here so now we need to put our seat cut on now one of the limitations of this square is that on really slight seat cuts like this it doesn't actually reach all the way through the timber so what i'm going to do in this instance is just get my short level and run that up the side of the square until it reaches my 1.9 mark and then i can just literally as long as that's all nice and square to the to the guide here just run that mark straight through there now this piece off here right okay bridges up and now sit on the piece of timber that i put on there and i know we haven't got it lined up exactly with the roof yet but we'll do that shortly so as you can see we've got a fairly nice cut down onto these noggins so the next thing that we have to do let's just check this level always make sure [Music] perfect so that's absolutely brilliant so the next thing we've got to do is fix this ridge we know it's we know it's level now what we've got to do is make sure that it runs in line with this roof so that when it comes all the way through it's nice and straight so what i'll do is basically i'll lie it down through here and then i'll straighten the ridge up and i'll put attack in it and then we'll get on to the lay boards right i've just dyed that through and actually it's uh it's pretty good where it is so what i'm gonna do is just put one one tacky in the top i don't want to go mad nailing at this point just in case there's a problem and we need to unpick anything so next we're going to have a look at the lay boards right so now it's time to have a think about cutting this lay board now this label was long enough that basically what i've done is i've i've put it onto this roof and i've slid it down the roof until it's hit the top of this truss here and the corner of our ridge here now what basically that's done is the underside of this lay board is now in this in the same plane as the pitch of this roof so what we can accurately do now is we can run a level or a straight edge this is the quickest and easiest way i find of marking up your lay boards there is a technical way of doing it but by the time you've taken all the measurements and levels and set it up it's as quick to do it this way so i run my level up the side or a straight edge up the side of the ridge and you must make sure that your ridge is plumb and so then i run the level up the side of the ridge and then i can just spy that line down onto that lay board and that will be accurate so the level goes up the side of the ridge there onto the lay board and then i transfer that mark across now the only other thing i need to do is take a measurement from the overall length of the lay board which will be from here down to the trusses at the bottom and then this the cut that goes on the bottom of the lay board will simply be 90 degrees from this cut and now what i can do is i can run my tape measure up to the ridge and then it doesn't have to be this doesn't have to be an exact measurement because the first rafter will be a certain away up the lay board so i think what i'm going to do in this instance is making sure it just catches the bottom of this truss here so i'm going to call that 2650 i've cut the top line of the lay board and what i'm going to do is just use my adjustable square and i've set the seat cut i've set the c cut to this line here so when i come down to the other end it's just a simple case that's my measurement i just put it on and mark that through and that will give me the square cut to the top cut so we'll cut that right so let's stick that up and see what it looks like it may need a little bit of adjustment we may have got it right the first time so yeah i think that's great i think we're pretty much spot on there so what we've got now is this lay board the outer edge of this lay board and the top outer edge of that ridge board they are the exact plane of this roof so when we if i take the camera when we look through this plane of this roof as i bring the camera down you'll see it comes into the plane of the roof can we i hope you can see that and that is the plane of the roof that all of our rafters will now fix to and that will make that roof lovely and flat perfect so what i'm going to do now is basically use that label there as a template and simply copy it onto the other layer board and get those fixed and then the last job there is to cut in some jack rafters so when i cut those two noggins initially in the top there to take the top of the ridge playboard that i've been provided with and i thought they'd be long enough for me to be able to take the noggin off the end well it turns out that it wasn't so unfortunately this lay board is going to be slightly short but it doesn't actually matter because the label doesn't have to come right down to the adjoining roof it only has to be long enough to take the first jack rafter so what i've done in this instance because because this lay board is slightly short and there's no uh trust for it to sit on what i've done is put a noggin in here to take the bottom of the label now what i'll do is i'll show you how i line up the bottom of this lay board in this instance so we're going to put the label in so it's right at the top so what i'll do you put my legboard in so that it's in the right position at the top same as the other side the top side of this lay board the top side of this lay board wants to run exactly with this outside edge of this ridge here and that becomes the correct plane of the roof so now i've got this uh lay board intersecting correctly with the ridge what i'm going to do is just pop one nail in you don't want to go mad and then i'll come down and show you how i line up the bottom of the lay board as i said this lay board doesn't come right down to this truss it doesn't actually have to because the first uh jack raft will be up here somewhere but what we've got to do now is line this edge of the lay board up with this plane of the roof and what i'll do here is simply push my level across so as we can see here look the level is nice in the plane of this roof and then all i've got to do without getting in the way of the camera is pull that lay board up until it hits that spot so again now we know that this this edge of this lay board is perfectly in this plane of in the plane of this roof and then without my air defenders on again i'll just put attack in that and put the level through look at that absolutely perfect if you see between here and here that lines in absolutely perfectly look so again what we've got there is we've now got the ridge and both of these lay boards in the perfect plane of this roof so now these two roofs intersect um and when we cut these jack rafters in they'll all be in the same plane and that will join this roof to that roof forming our valleys so the last and simplest job really and potentially the most satisfying is to mark out and cut the jack rafters so what we need to do now is set out for our jack rafters and this girder truss here i know is dead plum because i plumbed it in when i put it on so all we're simply going to do is carry on our 600 centers through which isn't many in this instance and we're going to use this uh outside girder truss as our measuring point so what i'm simply going to do and i keep my measurements on the downside so it's always to the longest point i'll show you that when we go down to the bottom so i just hook my tape over this outside truss of this triple and then we carry on our centers which in this case is 600 mil so 600 and then we're going that way because that's on that side of the line and then we go 1200 again and that way so what i'll do with those lines now is just square them across square them down and i'll do the same on the other side and mark both of these at the same time now when it comes to marking the bottom i know that this girder trusses upright so again simply what i do is hook my tape over the outside edge of this outside truss um i know that this there's a tiny gap here usually there isn't but you know if you can't hook it in you just hold it in and then i measure across my 600 and mark it onto this edge of the lay board and then as i said because i always mark to the lowest edge so this is always the longest point so again we know that this is straight and upright so we can use that as our measuring point again here we go 1.2 meters which is the next 600 there and then we know there are points so now what we've got for our jack rafters is we've got our two fixed points so we simply and i know this regularized tim was absolutely fantastic um but the only sort of i wouldn't call it a downside it's not a downside if you don't want splinters but is you haven't got an exact point to measure to when you look at this timber here that the truss is made of it's got a lovely square edge so we do have to sort of i'm not going to say we guess it but we definitely sort of have to have a bit of interpretation as to where the edges with this kind of timber but let's let's go let's go somewhere in the middle there so i hold that on the lay board mark there and on my ridge board mark here and i'm gonna call that six six nine so what i'm gonna do there you just put a little measurement there and that six six nine is from the longest point to the longest point and i do the same on this lower one now fortunately again i can reach is if this was a much uh bigger infill i would obviously have to have a hand from somebody so again hold that on the lay board mark and then up to the ridge and we're going to call that again we're going to call that 13-19 now what's interesting now is that if this is dead straight and everything square as it should be the measurements on the other side to the lay board should be exactly the same so let's have a look and see so same as we did on the other side there i've got a 600 mark here along this point and then cross up the roof and then the same [Music] 1200 he's here that's the longest point cross up the roof now let's have a look see how square we are or how good the trusses are so i'm going to drop my tape onto that one there and we have got oh i'll have that 13 17 maybe a millimeter difference um this one will tell more because it's shorter so this one is here what we got there six six five i can't remember what we had there six six nine so yeah pretty much that's that's not bad so that when we eyed when i eyed this ridge through obviously these trusses are good enough and as i ride it through i could obviously get it straight measurements are great and levels are great but sometimes you do just have to let your eye be your guide right so we're going to cut these jack rafters now and basically um i was always used to a little bit daunted by jack rafters but the reality is it's just a rafter that's got a slightly different cut on the bottom so the first thing we need to do is find the the pitch of this roof now i know what the pitch this roof is but let's pretend we don't so what i'm going to do is simply get my level again and i'm going to physically mark the plumb line on this roof now again the reason we're doing this is um with the best one in the world let's say these plates are slightly out of level the pitch of this roof would then slightly alter and your cuts would be out so sticking a level on it is really the best way to get it most accurate so then what i do i've got my roofing square again and we're going to set it on the plumb this is the plumb line so i literally simply put that onto that plumb line we just measured tighten off the screw and that is now set so that square now gives us the plumb cut along this edge and the seat cut along that edge so these jack rafters all we literally do is we put a plum cut on this end and a seat cut on this end now what i'm going to do just by way of explanation and just to try and demystify it a little bit because i know it can be daunting for people is i'm what i'm going to do is i'm just going to put a flat seat cut on the bottom of here put it back on the roof and then show you the the compound part of the jack cup so 13 18. i'm going to cut this square and then put it back on the roof just to show you right let's see if we can make this sauce sweat a bit more shall we big cup for this right we'll take this we'll take this jack cut up onto the roof now what you can see here is we've got a seat cut which is this is the c-cut of this roof because it's in a flat plane here don't let this pitching up put you off so the seat we've got a seat cut and a plum cut our plum cut fits nicely against the ridge and our seat cut we see our longest measurement here our seat cut fits nicely along this lay board now the issue is is that we've got a flat cut here so we want this we want to cut the bottom of this rafter so it sits nicely on this lay board now what we've got to do to do that is basically put a compound cut on this c-cut now what's really simple here is all we now do is we find the pitch of this roof and we set the circular saw to that pitch and we basically make this cut with the saw set to this pitch and then that'll give us that lovely seat cut the pitch of the roof that we're cutting into is 23 degrees so if we look at the saw here we just literally i've got a back and guide on this one we bring it round until it reads so we've got that's 15 20. we've got 25 there so let's just go just closer i've got to judge that 23 degrees now what we do is run the saw through that seat cut set like this and that will give us that the compound part of the seat cup right hopefully this is going to look alright i know that i've already cut this once let's have a look see if i can find it i can't even see it so now we have a 23 although this isn't 23 degrees because it's cut along the seat cut the saw is set to 23 degrees so now this should fit perfectly on that label let's have a look now when we put the plum cut at the top when we roll that down look at that absolutely lovely so we've now got that seat cut but it's also got the raking cut of this roof so now we can just do that with the other rafters and pretty much get them now then so now we're nailing this in all we need to do is make sure that this jack rafter runs in with the line of this lay board we put a pin in the top and the same at the top here that the rafter runs in line with the ridge we put a pin in here we don't want to nail this too hard in this at this point because what we don't want to end up doing is bow in the ridge so what i'll do now is i'll cut the other one and fix that and then move on to the last pair now it's it's really important it can get a bit confusing and you can you can get a bit lost but i put these marks on the lower side of the rafter onto the lay board and then that way when you're cutting you're always cutting to the longest point all the time it's easier so again what's really important here is now we're doing the the opposite of that one i've put my my seat cut on the bottom of my jack rafter but i've got to make sure that the point is going the right way so in this case it's the opposite of that one so it's just one of those things and it's caught me out many many times as i suspect it has many other people you just have to make sure that you cut with it the angle going the right way so that's now again as we said that's our longest point so i think the measurement was 19 no 13 17 so again longest point to longest point we come 13 17. that's the longest point at our ridge so we simply have our plum cut on there and then we can cut that on a square cut it's rubbishing it yeah and now we can simply go around the other side and fix it so again we go to our ridge at the top and get this edge to the edge of the lay board nice and flush with the ridge at the top and the lay board at the bottom and we just put one pin in for a minute same at the top that's it just this last pair to cut and then we can fix the whole lot right so now we'll just put that last pair in exactly the same as the others we've got our marks on the ridge marks on the leg board we just slide it up until it's this top of this jack rafter is lining in with this lay board a little pin in it same in the ridge same on the other side as you see the top line of this jack rafter lines in perfectly with the lay board because as i said earlier the lay board represents the plane of the adjoining roof and one in the top now i'm happy with that it all looks great so what i'm now going to do is nail the whole thing up right so that's it hopefully i've done a reasonable job of explaining to you what i'm doing i've been doing these kind of rules for over 30 years and never really felt the need to explain it to anybody so i hope that it may have been interesting or helpful i always really enjoy doing these kind of little things i get great satisfaction out of them i'd say in terms of roofing roofing progression i'd say and if you saw in one of my other videos i did a small mono uh truss roof that would be sort of a starting point for roofing then perhaps you'd move up to a roof uh you know not this similar to this would be uh roof trusses gable into gable end uh and then i suspect the next progression from that would be a gable into gable then hand cut roof and then i think once you go beyond that you start to get into the realms of what we're doing here which is forming valleys using lay boards and then moving on from that would be full hand cut rooms roofing's something that i've always really enjoyed and i wouldn't say i'm the best roofer in the world but there's no roof that i haven't been able to tackle so far and as with everything in carpentry realistically you never stop learning so anyway that's us done um i'm very lucky today that my son has come out and held the camera for me so hopefully we've got some good footage and i hope you've enjoyed the video thanks for watching all of these trusses are all in the line of the roof as is our jack as is our lay board so now we've got a lovely flat plane from this roof into that roof you

Channel: The Tall Carpenter

Views: 220,341

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Id: PmD8ViTt8NQ

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021