How To Make Rafters For A Roof

On some roof trusses the 2 top chords extend down over the edges of the bottom chord creating a built in overhang.

How to make rafters for a roof.

They also make sheathing and adding roofing material a bit more difficult due to the added angles on your roof. The benefit of a truss over older structural designs like coupled rafters is that it provides longitudinal support. In essence a roof built on trusses is much more structurally sound. Your top chords can protrude beyond the bottom chord anywhere from 1 3 feet 0 30 0 91 m.

To lay out a common rafter you need the pitch of the roof expressed in units of rise per foot of run in the gable roof example shown here a rafter with 6 in 12 pitch rises 6 in. Before you cut your boards you ll need to measure the width of your building and calculate the exact length of each rafter. A rafter or speed square will have marks for both of these angles. Also known as a king common the king rafter is the center rafter between two hip rafters.

A roof truss is a structural framework of timbers designed to bridge the space above a room and to provide support for a roof. Laying out hip valley and jack rafters takes experience and skill but if you re building a simple gable or shed roof all you need is the common rafter the basic building block of roof framing. For every foot. These rafters require extra measurement to mesh the hip gable to the ridge beam properly.

The roof rafters provide integral structural support to the roof.