For the past week or so in studio, I have been a part of the group that is in charge of creating shop drawing for a project that was started last semester at the Old Towne Creek Park. The shop drawings themselves have been a great learning experience for myself because I get to actually think about how these components will be made and fabricated either here at the on-campus woodshop, or on site. We also got the chance to take a tour of the on-campus woodshop to get a feel of the kinds of tools we will be using to create the components for not only Old Towne Creek, but also Plymouth Park. The shop drawings group broke up into different groups in order to maximize efficiency and each group has a particular portion of the Old Towne Creek structure to make shop drawings for. I am in the group that is in charge of the roof system, but primarily how exactly we will be cutting the rafters.
Above you can see the specific step by step process of how we will be cutting the rafters in order to fit the columns given the roofs slope. One of the main challenges I faced during this process was deciding to what certainty I wanted to round to while still managing to make the steps as exact as possible. In the end, I decided to round to the nearest 1/16th of an inch since I believe that is the most exact measurement the human eye can make while having minimal room for error. Another great learning part of this process was making sure that each step would make sense for someone who wasn’t involved in the creation of the shop drawings. One of the prime examples of that would be the angle at which the birds mouth is cut. Since the rafters I sloped, the birds mouth will be cut at a specific angle relative to the bottom of the rafter itself. After some careful measuring, the angle ended up being about 99.5 degrees. Overall, the steps we are taking as a class is a great learning experience and makes this project feel that more real. I am excited to get the construction phase and experience what that will be like.