Good title for a book!   think I may be plagiarizing though …

Well, not beams exactly but rafters.  We placed the first three rafters over the weekend.  We are using 12″ round logs as our rafters.  The rafters are  spaced on 4′ centres and blocked up for a roof slope of 2.5″ over 4′.  This makes for a fairly shallow or low-slope roof.

A lot of prep work over the last week has gone into getting those rafters into place.  We started by sandblasting.  The rafters have been sitting outside for years, are quite weathered, and all need to be cleaned up.  We have a total of 30 log rafters in our building and we have sandblasted eleven of them so far.  It is taking us about an hour to clean each log and that hour does not include the time to collect, dry and sift the sand.  This is a slow, somewhat tedious, job.  Fortunately it is not physically demanding, but the sand gets everywhere!

We stain the logs after they have been cleaned up.  We are using a water-based stain on the logs as these stains are generally a little easier on the environment than oil based stains.

We are notching the log rafters into the log pony wall sitting on top of the tire wall.  Essentially this means we are cutting circular notches into the pony wall so the rafters pass through the walls.  It should be an attractive look … large timbers.  Cutting the notches is also a fairly slow process involving a router,a chainsaw and a lot of sawdust.

As to actually placing the beams, pictures are worth thousands of words …

The first rafters that we placed are about 18′ long.  That easily makes each of these rafters weigh over 350 lbs.  We used a forklift with 12′ fork extensions to bring the rafters to the back of he building and then roll them onto the north edge o the back wall.  Given the weight of these rafters we have been using the forklift to handle them at each stage of the process.

After rolling the rafter off of the forks of the forklift, we rolled it to the front of the building.  This got easier with each rafter as we had a shorter distance to roll … Did I mention these things are heavy!

We had to lever the rafter up each time the blocking got higher to accommodate the slope of the roof.  And finally …

We are going to be at this for a while!