Coping Strategies

So I have a project coming up sometime in the mid-future which will involve coping. This is basically where instead of making a pair of 45 degree miter cuts on an inside corner, you instead let one board run square into the corner, and then cut the other board to fit.

That second operation is known as coping, and you start by cutting the board at the normal 45 degree angle, and then come in with another wood removal technique to follow the intersection of that 45 degree cut and the profile of the board to form a relief-cut in order to make room for it to fit over top of the first square-cut board.

The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it allows the square cut board (often the longer piece) to shift in length without having to worry about a miter opening up. Secondly, if a gap does open between the two pieces, the square cut board basically fills the space behind the coped board, so the gap is much less visible than it would be with a miter that's split open.

Now there's a number of techniques used for coping, and the important factor is that you need to be able to essentially make a compound angled cut. The actual angle isn't important, it just needs to be a continuous cut that clears the other piece by a reasonable margin in every relevant axis.

The most basic method is to use a fret saw to manually cut the cope relief. This works, but it's a bit of a pain in the ass, kind of slow, and fret saw blades are very prone to breaking.

Another common method is to use an angle grinder with a 40 grit flap disc. This supposedly works well despite sounding like it would make absolute mince out of the board you're working on. It also generates a lot of fine, airborne dust, which isn't always ideal.

The method I chose to pursue, however, is to use a jigsaw. Now normally a jigsaw can make only simple miter cuts by angling the foot plate. This would get you most of the way there, but you'd have difficulty making that cut connect on inside corners. To get a compound cut, we'll instead remove the original footplate and install this Collins coping foot #not-sponsored which is a conical/spherical/rounded foot that allows you to freehand the angle of the cut in two axes.

To actually use it, you flip the jigsaw upside-down and cut from the bottom. I found it surprisingly comfortable to cradle the jigsaw this way and operate the trigger with my thumb.

Now at first it might seem alarming to cut from the backside with the blade pointed towards your face, but it really works surprisingly well. About the only thing I needed to pay attention to was making sure I got the right blade speed to keep the board from vibrating (not too slow, not too fast), and then it was as simple as just following the line.

For a practice piece I just grabbed this hunk of scrap OSB and did an excessively angled back-cut on what had previously been some square cuts, aiming to follow the corner of those existing cuts on the face side.

And from the front side, it looks pretty... much like a hunk of scrap OSB.

The important thing is that it was very easy to follow the line quite precisely while maintaining the compound undercut angle, including going around the inside corner. I think I'll probably practice on a few scraps of the actual molding material when the time comes, but I feel quite confident that I'll be able to make the cuts without a problem.

I should also add here that installation of the foot plate was very simple. Jigsaws have been around long enough that they're pretty much all universal (except for Festool, of course) so this foot is basically a one-size-fits-all thing, only coming with a few shims to accommodate some models that need a bit more clearance (I needed to install the thin shim for my Milwaukee saw).

So yeah, good purchase, well worth the money.

The Great Fluffening Part 8

Since my vacation days are coming to a close I decided to clean up some more fiddly tasks today, starting with getting the soffit vent covers prepped for installation.

And the first step of preparing them is to remove the bar code sticker, which was expertly placed to block 90% of the vent area.

I wonder how many of these have been installed with this bar code sticker still in place, over the years? I'm guessing somewhere between "all of them" and "all of them".

The Prop 65 warning will, of course, be staying. We can't have anyone being unknowingly exposed to aluminum, after all.

While we're here, I also checked to make sure that the 2 inch hole saw I have would make the right sized hole for these to fit snugly into.

And that is, indeed, a delightfully snug fit into this piece of wood that will now double as an installation tool. It also reminded me that my 2 inch hole saw is just slightly not deep enough to cut all the way through a piece of universal wood from one side, which is awkward. But more on that later, we've got stickers to remove.

And remove and remove and remove.

Now we need to prime these, and it just so happens that I have some aluminum primer left over from the awning refreshening I did a while back.

And so on it goes.

And on and on and on.

Now my house isn't primer-coloured (well, it's a slightly different shade of primer, I guess) so now would be a good time to use up a bit more of that jar of sample paint I got a short while back.

Or maybe it was a long while back. Well, a little peeling and stirring later and it's looking good as... usable.

You know what? It spreads on fine, so let's paint.

And paint and paint and paint.

Well that was a bit of work, let's take a short bicycle break.

We don't have winter here, we have smog. People do love their wood burning fireplaces this time of year.

Anyway, back at it and it's mail time.

Using a knife that wasn't long enough to make it half way through the foam wasn't really cutting it, pun entirely intended, so I picked up an 18mm utility knife. I also ordered some non-snap blades so that the blade wouldn't snap while I had it extended like this, but they're arriving a bit late so I'll just try to be careful with the one (1) snap blade that was included with the knife.

I know that size isn't supposed to matter, but it's gotta be long enough to do the job!

Also in that delivery was a 1 inch hole saw to add to my hole saw kit. I don't need it for this project, but I do need it for "don't assume I have a 1 inch hole saw in this kit when there actually isn't one".

But more importantly, I got this hole poker.

This is a 2 inch self-feeding auger bit, which looks like it should rightly be a wrist-breaker-9000-deluxe.

Which just barely fits into the chuck on my drill.

But despite appearances to the contrary, it actually goes through this universal wood surprisingly smoothly; even moreso I dare say than the hole saw which has a tendency to bind and grab. This just chews up the wood and spits it out the back effortlessly. I like it.

And yes, it does drill the holes sufficiently on-size.

Now I was going to go around poking holes in my soffits today, but it occurred to me that some of the insulation panels I've installed are being held up mostly just by the seam tape and the wishes of small children. Like, most of them are in there pretty snug, but there's a few that are just lightly set in place. Given that, it seemed likely that a strong wind blowing in through the soffit vents might be enough to pop them out and send them crashing back down to the car hole floor, and so I decided that I should hold off on the soffit vents until I get the strapping nailed up.

So let's carry on with the insulation installation instead.

I'm happy to announce that I made it through the first roll of seam tape.

So that means I damn well better be at least 1/4 of the way done, because I only bought 4 rolls of it.

Speaking of doneness, I managed to fill these two rafter bays before running out of working hours.

There's just the one more teensy wedge-shaped bay on this side to go (which you can see in the upper left), which is nice, because it means I can move the insulation panels inside if there's any rain in the forecast, and they won't be too terribly in the way if I stack them under here. I don't think they'd get damaged by being rained on, but all the same I don't want to deal with wet insulation panels.

Oh, and I also furred out and insulated this little cheese wedge.

There's three more rafter bays on the other side that would have been nice to get done, as then I could move my band saw back into its home, so I'll probably tackle those next as I putter along to finish up this job. I also have the 4 full size rafter bays on that side to do, but I'm holding off on those for a bit as I'll need to move some car hole crap out of the way to access them properly.

On the subject of puttering along, I'm expecting progress to slow considerably from here on out, so this will be the last of the daily-ish updates. I'll make another post here and there as I run across things worth sharing or just to summarize the work that's been done, but other than that it's back to the usual schedule of occasionally shouting into the void for me.

For now, I'm calling this another project successfully part-done.

The Great Fluffening Part 7

Today we're going through the looking glass, which is to say doing basically the same thing as yesterday but in a mirror image.

The car hole door brackets got a shortening on this side and some blocking installed, the little triangle in the corner got some blocking and a cheese wedge of insulation, and after all of that I managed to have just enough time to fill two measly rafter bays with foam.

Two rotten, measly rafter bays. And let me tell you, you would have to search long and hard to find a bigger concentration of mease than these two rafter bays. The one on the left loses a good half inch in width from the bottom to the top, and if you think that's bad, the one on the right goes from about 16 inches at the bottom to barely 13 inches at the top.

Luckily these two rafter bays are the worst in the whole roof (well, except for maybe the one right next to them), so getting them out of the way should be a lot of work off my plate.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that I'm not going to get the whole insulation project done before my vacation is up, particularly since I'm trying to actually enjoy some R&R in between sessions of wrestling with framing and insulating. The good news is that the project is in a state now where I can just chip away at it whenever I find time, and there shouldn't be anything major to trip me up from here on out.

The Great Fluffening Part 6

I was hoping that today would just be tossing insulation up into the rafters non-stop, but one minor issue did end up stopping me for a little detour: the mounts for my car hole door tracks.

I don't really want to entomb these forever behind the insulation, strapping and drywall (just entombing them behind the drywall would be acceptable, though), so I'm going to put in a piece of blocking and lower them down below the level of the rafters.

Like this, basically.

Cutting through the slotted angle wasn't too bad to do with my snips, and I made sure to bevel the ends so as not to leave a pointy-sharp right angle.

Anyway, with that done I was ready to get rolling with stuffing the insulation, and now that I had yesterday's experience under my belt, I surely wouldn't be spending an hour on fitting the insulation panel into each stud bay.

Or at least that's what I told myself before spending an hour on fitting the insulation panels into each stud bay.

I did a little reset though and had a think about the pain points I was running into, and decided to switch things up a little bit by cutting the panels cross-ways into 4 foot panels rather than lengthwise into 8 foot ones. Wrestling the full 8 foot lengths up here was turning out to be quite a chore, and cutting them was equally awkward given that the straightedge I was using is only 4 feet long.

These 4 foot panels did indeed turn out to be much easier to deal with, and despite needing to do twice the layout and cutting, the process went much quicker than with the 8 foot ones, so I'll be continuing like this from here on I think.

Of course, there's only 6 more full-length rafter bays until I get into the weeds of the valley rafter bays, so I was going to run out of places to stick 8 foot panels soon anyway.

The Great Fluffening Part 5

When last we left off, there was just a little bit of framing yet to do, starting with finishing off these collar tie-ish pieces.

Which went in pretty smoothly.

Then we just needed a bit of blocking along the top of this wall, which we'll use later to nail some strapping to.

Which was a good way to use up the world's shittiest piece of universal wood.

Honestly it was more knot than wood, so sticking it in a completely nonstructural location like this made a lot of sense.

But with that done, it's time to get to the main event: actually, finally installing insulation.

It's a good thing I have just barely enough clear space in my car hole to fit a 4x8 sheet of this 2-inch polyiso board.

Anyway, it gets cut out and up it goes.

The cut on this one isn't super smooth. I tried a score-and-snap technique but it wasn't great for a 2 inch thick piece of foam. On the next piece I tried cutting it with a hand saw and it resulted in a much cleaner cut, but was pretty slow.

I think using a utility knife to cut from both sides might be the answer, I'll try that on the next sheet. But first, I want to get the tape up on these two panels while the ladders are in a good spot.

Is it strictly necessary? Eh, can't hurt.

And it's not especially difficult to install.

Just to sate my curiosity, I grabbed my IR camera and took a snapshot of the roof here.

I really didn't expect to see much of a difference, but somehow even in the dead of winter, at about 10°c outside, the insulation is impressively effective. The underside of the sheathing was upwards of 19°c and the insulation was more around 13-14°c. Of course I don't mind the solar gain in the winter, but come summer this reduction will be very welcome, and I can always stick a heater out here on the chilly days to warm things up now that the heat won't be just directly escaping out through the roof.

Well, now I just need to do the entire rest of the roof. Better get to that.

The Great Fluffening Part 4

Yesterday I took a little spanksgiving break to go climb a mountain on my bike.

Which is a thing that people do.

I also did my usual Thursday grocery shopping, and topped up my cookie supply.

Which is a thing that people do.

But today is Friday (in California) so it's back on the job enfluffening my car hole.

When we last left off, I had installed these collar-tie like joists along the main peak of the roof, but when I put the last board in, despite positioning it in basically the same way as all the others, it ended up about 3/4" higher. Now I'm not a real huge stickler for sub-micron accuracy when it comes to framing, but this was going to be a bit much, especially since I needed to measure off this board for the rest of the framing along the back wall. So, I cut some shims and tacked them to the underside to bring it back roughly into line.

Speaking of the back wall, I'm going to need something to nail into, which means nailing up some universal wood horizontally here. I don't much fancy trying to hold onto a 12 foot, soaking wet piece of universal wood one-handed while wrestling my nail gun trying to get it sufficiently secured all at once, so instead I opted for nailing up a temporary support block that I could rest one end on while I nail the other end up.

This worked very well, and the first board went up without a problem.

Now I did have some concerns here about how well the nails here would hold, since they're 3 inch nails going through 1-1/2 inches of universal wood plus 1/2 inch of drywall, which only leaves a single inch left to go into the studs here. However, prying the temporary support block off the wall reassured me that this would be more than sufficient.

It put up an impressive fight, despite only being held up by one single nail.

I cut the second board to fit and installed it in much the same manner, making sure to cut the board 1/8" short to give myself a little wiggle room.

And uh... I maybe should have given myself a bit more than 1/8".

But it's in there nice and snug.

Installing the ceiling joist thingies was largely a matter of rinse-and-repeat. I used a level to plumb down a line from one side of the rafter, then ran a level line from the bottom of the wall board here to the rafter, then followed those marks to nail up another chunk of universal wood.

Things got more interesting when it came time to fit things around the valley rafters, though. The joists were going to go from the wall board to the last perpendicular joist that we got familiar with up at the start of the day, which was simple enough, but they'd need to be notched to make it around the roof framing.

I started out by transferring the valley rafter intersections down to the joist using a speed square, then notched it out using my chop saw and a chisel.

Then I notched out the end to fit around one of the rafters so that this joist could fit up flush against the bottom of the other.

Of course, then I realized two things. 1: I could remove a lot less wood from the first notch if I just cut it diagonally, and 2: I don't need the notch at the end because this board is supposed to be flush with the shims, not the bottom of the joist.

So you know how it goes, the second one always looks better than the first.

I didn't waste the first one, of course. It's up there too, and is still plenty strong enough to span the roughly 42 inch gap it's filling.

And that's as far as I got before I had to call it a day and bake some bread. There's still 4 more joists to go, but that's just more of the same, plus I need a faux rafter on the far wall to support the ends of some strapping that will eventually support both the insulation above and the drywall below.

It would have been nice to get all the framing done this week, but I've still got all next week to finish things up, so I'm pretty sure I'm still on schedule for that.