From: eirik@elf.TN.Cornell.EDU (Eirik Fuller)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: roofing
Date: 14 Oct 1992 05:59:43 GMT
Organization: Cornell Theory Center
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost


I've been tuned out of this group for a while.  We've had enough
decent weather lately that it seems I'll actually finish shingling my
roof before snow falls.  I've spent more time near roof boards than
keyboards the past week.

Working on my roof is always an adventure.  Two years ago we
discovered the "diving board" overhangs that were responsible for the
visible droop.  Whoever nailed a fourteen foot row of two foot long
boards into the last rafter either had a strange sense of humor, or no
clue about structural integrity.  Last year we found siding under the
roof; it wasn't until then that I realized the back of my house is
newer than the front.  This year we found a roof within a roof; there
was an old tin roof under the roof section we ripped up last week.
That explained the lack of overhang on that roof section; the rafters
were nailed right into the old tin roof, but they didn't reach its
edge.  All of the dormers had rafters nailed into roof boards, which
makes it fun to replace old roof boards with new plywood decking.

Nothing we found while ripping up roof boards and rafters qualifies as
a hack, though.  Gross kludges, maybe.  Hacks, no.

I think some of our recent activities might qualify, though.

We put in one piece of plywood on the main roof near the chimney; one
end of it is inside of the nearby dormer.  The rafter beneath the end
of that piece is too low; somehow we didn't notice that until after
we'd nailed it in.  Rather than taking it back out and fixing that
rafter, we started looking for another solution.  We found a lumber
scrap, a leftover dormer rafter, that magically fit underneath the
part of the plywood piece beyond the low rafter.  The top part was
angled for the roof peak, which allowed us to wedge it in place; the
bottom part was angled funny because it was half of the notch near the
bottom of the rafter; it had somehow broken in just the right spot.
We nailed the plywood into it before nailing it down.  Retroactive
rafter fitting ...

Better yet is the hack for fitting decking around a dormer rafter.
Describing this without pictures might qualify as a hack too ...

Because of the dormer, there are two intersecting planes of plywood
which form a valley.  One of the rafters in the dormer ends right in
the valley; there wasn't any other place nearby suitable for nailing
it.  The piece of decking on the main roof (the same one with the
retroactive rafter) had to be notched to fit around that rafter; this
left a hole in the decking which wound up on the outside of the
valley.  That all gets hidden by flashing eventually, but it still
annoyed me to have a gap that big in the decking.

What I did was cut the nearby piece of the decking for the dormer in
such a way that it fills that gap.  Ordinarily the cut for the valley
is a straight cut at some acute angle; that plywood edge sits on top
of the decking on the main roof, which forms the valley.  Instead of a
simple straight cut, I made two straight cuts toward the part of the
decking piece over the gap, then cut a (convex) right angle notch
protruding out of what would otherwise be the straight line along the
valley.  That notch fits nicely inside of the gap left by the rafter
notch.

In case anyone wonders ... no, I didn't cut that notch with a hack
saw.  :-)

For those who don't like the taste of that "hack", chew on this one:


#!/bin/sh -
bn () { eval echo '$'$# ; }
ifs="$IFS" ; IFS=/ ; z=`bn $0` ; IFS="$ifs"
exec /usr/lang/SC1.0/$z "$@"
Newsgroups: alt.hackers