Cutting Rafters for a Shed the Easy Way | Building a Shed Doesn't Have to be Hard

[Music] what i want to do is show you guys a little trick that i use every once in a while to make things go faster than getting out the big framing square and doing a whole bunch of jigging in order to get the bird's mouth cuts made of my rafter so come on with me here guys i just got this rafter up here and i haven't cut it to length or done anything with it it is exactly the length it was in the log form i think it's about 12 foot eight inches give or take what i typically do first is i think back to what my what my slope was or my pitch was and i came up with a 3 by 12 pitch or 3 to 12. basically every foot it runs it goes up 3 inches now in this case that's going to be very critical because that is going to be a number that i look at on my speed square when i'm starting to cut my bird's mouths now when i talk about a bird's mouth i'm basically talking about the cut in my rafter that allows it to sit flat on top of my beams and i have two of them so i'm going to need two bird's mouth cuts i've already made one of those bird mouth cuts in fact i made two of them on one of my rafters but i'm going to show you guys how i do it sometimes to do it uh more quickly than the framing square here's what i do i get the rafter i crown it meaning i look down it and i see which way it's sort of bending typically every piece of lumber has a bit of a crown to it i put that crown facing up with the thought that as it settles it flattens out the other thing i do is i cut it to length first and foremost and then i lay it up where it's going to go i position it so that i have the overhang on the front and the back of the building that i want in this case let's just pretend i'm doing that [Music] all right and we're just we're just uh we're just sort of playing around here a little bit so let's just pretend that's where it was going to go what you have to be certain of is it is sitting on the mark where the rafter will be attached so you have to make sure that this is plumb that that's plumb and you have to make sure you've made all your layout lines on top of the raft on top of the beams that way it's not sort of cockeyed like this or this so that when you make these cuts they're sitting exactly where they're going to sit when you secure it let's pretend this is where it was going to go what i do is i take my speed square and i can actually just sort of hold it up against the beam here and you can decide which way you hold it and just so you can see on this side i hold it up against that beam and then i take my pencil and i make a mark and i'm going to mark on this side of it all right see that line there that line if you were to continue it downwards would be flush with the face of the beam i make a mark there and i go to the back of the beam and if you guys swing around here you guys will see what i'm talking about imagine i had that flush and i make a mark all right so you guys can watch me do it here i'm gonna mark it like this you guys see that and let's do it a little better on this side i'm gonna hold it just like that okay and then i'm going to make sure that hasn't moved and i'm going to go up and repeat the process and if we lower this down here a little bit what you're going to notice is i have two lines here my seat cut which i'll explain in a minute is more or less going to go across like this and my plum cut is going to go down like that i'm going to be cutting out this material right here that is going to sit nice and flat on top of the beam that's going to be one of my bird's mouth cuts the other one's going to be up there let's go to the let's go to the saw for a minute and i'll show you exactly how this gets set up with my speed square all right guys well here's our rafter and there's the two lines that we just scribed onto this rafter over there when it was up on top of the beam now you can always tell if those lines are where they should be if you're to take your speed square and we'll flip it the right way if you line up your speed square with that line you just drew and you use the very corner here where it says pivot as a pivot you should be able to read over here to this number which is along the common rafter line and you should see the number three which is correct for our case because it's a pitch of 312 for the roof if this is something else you should go back and double check the line you scribed because that means that that line is not at the correct angle at this point of the game what i would do if i haven't gone all the way up the rafter i would continue that line you can hold it like this or you can go back to the pivot point position it at the three and scribe your line and then you do the same thing down here you're basically just continuing the line all right this more or less gives you the window where your where your your bird's mouth is going to be where you're going to be cutting and so if you can imagine you know the thickness of that beam it's four inches in your case it might be something different so if you take your speed square along this edge here notice it's got the dimensions and inches one two three all the way to four inches if you keep this side of the speed square right on that line there and make sure you come down right to this edge with the pivot point so what you're going to notice is from that pivot point over to this line it should be the dimensions of your beam the width in this case it's four inches so that's perfect make sure once again the speed square is lined up and what you're going to get is you're going to get a line that shows you where you're cutting this down here is going to be your bird's mouth right here along this top we're going to call that the seat cut that cut there you call it the plum cut plum cut seat cut forms the bird's mouth that's what we're cutting out as i mentioned we also would have made these two marks at the upper beam and so i would just shuffle down the rafter go up to the upper part of the beam or upper part of the rafter excuse me and make the same type of cut so that's what i've done already on one of my rafters mind you this can be accomplished with a framing square but in this case this is quite a bit faster you guys could see here here's the finished product and obviously the marks we made before the the rafter wasn't in the final position but this rafter is in the final position so what i do is i take this rafter and then i use it as my template and i basically just trace out where we're going to cut and you'll see that in just a minute you

Channel: Sawing with Sandy

Views: 152,934

Keywords: Simple Rafter Cutting Techniques, Rafter cutting made easy, Making the perfect rafter cut, how to cut rafter birdsmouth, Cutting rafters for a shed the easy way, Cutting rafters without a framing square, building a shed without experience, why roof rafters scare me, easy to understand shed rafter, cut rafters right the first time, rafter cutting basics, types of rafter cuts, Why I threw away my framing square, Shed building doesn't have to be hard, building a shed is easy

Id: qVC6Zrbqpss

Length: 6min 53sec (413 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021