Work Resumes on Porch

I’m happy to say that work has now resumed on the porch. Delay was caused by a labour shortage but now Andre has employed a new apprentice, Brain. Over the last few weeks Andre and Brian have been cutting all the joints for the porch and I must say they look very nice. Apart from some bolts holding the porch to the house and the post bases I think it will all be pegged so possibly no nails involved – old school and I love it.

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We were hoping to get a lot of these timbers painted or at least have a primer coat before they got erected, but all the wood was pretty much cut in the last week or two and we just didn’t have the time, Aimee has O+ fast approaching and I have tight deadlines at work which means I have to do day job work most evenings and a bit at weekends, yes it sucks. We did manage to get some timbers painted but the rest will have to wait.

We promised the city historical officials that we’d rebuild the porch as close to the original as possible.  Original pillars were true 4″x4″ with a chamfer width of 1″, new pillars are being beefed up to 5″x5″ so scaling up the chamfer we were looking at a width of about 1.25″. The ones Andre made were 3/4″ and although done well, they just looked underwhelming. In all fairness to Andre, he was using the largest chamfer bit he could safely use with a hand held router, any larger and it starts to get dangerous. Obviously I wasn’t happy, so last weekend I devised a jig (based off this jig), trouble was we had until Thursday (3^rd Oct) to complete them as that was the day that Andre had hired extra hands to help raise the porch.

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It took me half a day to make the jig and then an hour or two extra to refine it after initial test cuts. By the way, for situations like this I pretty much rely on Cyanoacrylate glue (super glue) as you have a strong bond in a few minutes.

Apart from the ends of the chamfers, which needed to be finished by hand, the results were surprisingly good, only issue was it was time consuming. The router used a 1/2″ bit and due to the jig design you had to make maybe 5 to 6 passes. I timed making the chamfers for one edge and it took about 45 minutes and an extra 20 minutes to clean up the chamfer ends by hand. So for one pillar we’re talking about 4 1/2 hours and we had 12 pillars to do. Ouch!

There was no way that we were going to finished them in time so I spoke with Andre and he kindly took over the task, which I think took him and Brian probably two days. I definitely think it was worth the extra effort, so thank you Andre and Brian.