In wood we trussed
What a busy few weeks it's been. I've been plain lousy at keeping my promise to blog more often. There just never seems to be time. I'm hoping to bang out a few entries over this long weekend any maybe even get up-to-date.
The framing process started about four weeks ago just as we finished setting our steel. Our wood comes in many forms (2x6, 2x4, trusses, sheet wood decking) just to name a few. My friends at Ron White Builders are the ones erecting our frame for us and they are smooth, quick and thorough.
The first wood on the job are the floor joists, long, narrow structural members that hold up the decking of the second floor (the first of our residential floors). In our case we're using pre-made wooden "trusses", fabricated by the Hostetler Truss Company. A truss is simply an array of lumber cut and joined in a specific fashion. It has several advantages over regular lumber, the biggest being that each pre-made piece is supposed to be exactly the right size for the opening and thus saves a lot of time on the installation. Regular lumber has to be cut and fit individually.
Trusses become the floor structure set 16"" on-center just like floor joists in a house.
The lumber in the trusses is held together by "joiner plates" with dozens of holes punched out so that the metal punched out becomes a "pin" that fastens the wood together. It's ingenious. It also looks like there's no way it's strong enough to hold the building together but as one of our architects explained to me, when you're working with wood, a lot of little connections is stronger than a few big connections like bolts. It's the opposite of what we saw with our steel frame, which is held together entirely with big bolts.
An example of a joiner plate stamped on the the wood of the truss.
I mentioned how much time can be saved by using trusses but that assumes that they all come in from the factory the right size! Some of ours did not. Due to a number of quirks and oversights some of them were wrong and either had to be replaced or modified. Soon enough though we got the second floor in and decked with the flat sheet lumber that becomes the "sub floor".