After today we’ll have our piers in place! In honor of our last concrete pour I thought I’d change the subject and bring the truss assembly back into the conversation.
As these piers were placed accurately to fit the programming, they have also been placed to make sure that they receive legs of the truss. If this doesn’t happen, well… we got issues. BUT! Good news is, a lot of work has been put in beforehand to make sure we don’t have such issues.
In prepping for building the trusses (soon to begin) a few of us had been working on “perfecting” the assembly. My role was to take the model and create templates of our various pieces.
This idea came about after the two mock ups we did a few weeks ago. We initially ran into issues with the angles of the segments and resulting arch. We then had issues with alignment of pieces and therefore bolts, causing us to have some struggles assembling the structure cleanly.
I was able to utilize the shop and work with someone at the firm I work at, Meadors, to CNC out of acrylic 3 “boomerangs” representing the lower chords of the truss, segments of the upper chords, and the webs. These templates will help make sure we can pattern shape our segments out of ipe as well as align our bolt holes so that our assembly can go together more smoothly. Over the 1.5 semesters of Community Build Studio I’ve gone through, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, its that prepping as much as you can and taking control of the project can save you a lot of struggles, time, and potentially money down the road.