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dollops of white paint
Wednesday, August 17 2005
I felt better today and so resumed work on the things I'd left unfinished during my Virginia vacation. But first I attacked the burgeoning vegetation along the front walkway. The visit to my parents' place, temperate-zone jungle that is, had spooked me regarding the power of plant life. I did all my snipping using a conventional pair of scissors, trimming the hummocks of grass and weed rosettes between the flagstones of the new walkway. I don't mind plants growing in the "grout" of sand between the stones. I just don't want to have to step over them. After I'd rolled back the progress of those plants to what looked like late May, I then hacked down the three and four foot weeds that grow in what passes, in earlier parts of the year, for our tulip and strawberry garden, strip of once heavily-mulched flowerbeds between the stone walkway and the house itself.
When that was done I resumed work on the solar deck project, which is itself a sub-project of the solar water heating project. Remember that the solar deck will be about eighty or ninety square feet in size and sit above the north end of the laboratory roof. The northmost end of that deck will be supported by ten foot wooden posts rising from either side of the existing laboratory deck (which lies outside the laboratory window). But the south end of the new deck will have to be supported by posts rising from the laboratory roof. I've built the H-shaped framework for the south end of the deck, but it's currently bolted to the northern framework. At some point I will have to climb up on the treacherous laboratory roof (which is pitched east and west at a death-tempting 45 degrees) and walk that southern framework to where it will eventually rest. The idea is to get its posts to sit squarely on a pair of two by ten rafters that I've already braced with a collar tie.
But determing from the outside where exactly these posts must end up has proved difficult; I bought a good stud finder in hopes it would help me find rafters through the shingles but it's useless in such applications. I've also tried shoving a powerful magnet up along the targeted ceiling rafters from below (using a tiny hole adjacent to the new collar tie) but its force field is undetectable through all the decking and roofing, even using extremely sensitive techniques such as iron filings poured on a piece of paper taped to the roof. (I have a ladder supported in the bed of my pickup allowing me to access the lower part of the laboratory roof from below.)
In the end I've been forced to take extremely careful measurements and hope for the best. I was able to get a good sense of how long the solar deck's floor joists should be by nailing a temporary board between the new deck's tent-foot-tall northern support posts and measuring from it to the collar tie, which corresponds precisely with the location of the rafters on the ceiling inside the laboratory. And, after performing some basic arithmetic with this number, I could put a dollop of white paint on a long piece of measured copper pipe and then, holding it precisely against the northern post, dab the roof deck. But despite the care I took with my measurements, I was sure there would be a problem. What if the rafters I was hoping to land upon had large whips in them and they strayed well out of the area where my posts would need to land? What would I do then?
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