Purlins, Straps and Screws

 05 Aug 21:

Worked on the new Sunfish Shack, today we added a few extra purlins (the horizontal 1x4s that the roof gets attached to). The basic spacing we chose for our low wind, low snow load area was 3 feet x 3 feet, and then we added a purlin under each end of each panel overlap, if there was not one already there. We added these purlins so we could drive the roof screws and not have the bare ends of screws poking out on the underside of the roof. All of the purlins are also attached to the rafters, and once we got everything mostly square we drove screws along the panels ridges over each purlin and along the rafter/purlin intersections.

Sunny today, the roof started to get a little warm just after Noon, 78F.

FYI the high roof point is the bow, lower roof is the stern. Started spacing rafters and adding purlins for the port side of the shack, still some adding and trimming of purlins to be done in this photo. In this photo you may notice that we made the starboard slip larger, we set the posts a little further apart so our widest trailer (CYANE's) can roll underneath the cover if needed.

The challenge when building a Shack and adding a metal roof is to try and get a square corner to work off of, for this shack we chose the starboard stern corner as our starting point and used a neon pink string run across the stern from starboard to port for as one alignment axis, and then used the stardboard edge of the first panel section as the other axis. There is a little bit of wiggle room for panel overlap and alignment but not much, we used the string and then the panels themselves to set the final lateral spacing of the rafters and fore and aft spacing, then tacked the rafters in place with tie straps. As we got a section or two of panels/rafters/purlins aligned we went back ad put the rest of the screws in the roof panels.

Ready for more purlins, straps and screws.

Log of the Sunfish Shack.