I never finished posting about the trellis we were building.

The posts we set seemed pretty solid the next day, although one of them had puddled with some overnight rain. I dropped a bit of concrete in to all the holes to encourage the water to not pool around the posts, then moved on to cutting the timber.

The first thing was to make up an outfeed support for the mitre saw.

My mitre saw is mounted on a rolling workbench, but our saw horses are too low tp provide anything beyond incidental support for timber as it is chopped off. When sawing the posts I had made a little stack of wood scraps to the right height, but that was not usable for chopping many pieces.

So, I made a simple outfeed support of the right dimensions from some larger offcuts and scraps. The top piece is the front of an old bathroom cabinet. I liked the varnished surface.

I also ensured that there was a lip all the way round so I could attach stop blocks for repeated cuts - there were a lot of these in the trellis framwework. Now, this is not a perfect solution, because the outfeed support is not actually attached to the same thing as the mitre saw so there is scope for movement in operation, but it is a good deal better than what I had before which involved repeated measuring.

There is a project I did about three years ago where I mounted slatted shelves inside a wardrobe. I wish I had thought of using a stop block method for that.

Anyway, armed with this new jig I cut the uprights and various spacer blocks used to make construction easier. When we installed the uprights I was delighted to discover that the tops were within spitting distance of being dead level - there was a half inch drop over twelve feet, a 1:288 slope (0.35%). Yay!

We tacked the uprights in place with deck screws while I drilled out the holes for the lag screws that were the real load bearers. I screwed in the lag screws while Jen chopped up the lumber for the laterals.

Once the uprights were in place, hanging the laterals went quite smoothly. The thing which scared me was how tight we were on screws.

Screws for some insane reason are sold by weight, which would be acceptable if there was ever anywhere to find out how many screws there are to the pound. I had done some calculations to estimate how many there were to the pound, but I had not had time to actually count the screws in a one pound box.

The screws in the box were dwindling down, and in fact we used precisely the last of them to hang the last lateral. Phew!

Here is how it turned out. It's about the same colour as our deck, which means our neighbours shouldn't see it as loudly as they might otherwise. I also understand that they are planning on putting in some screening vegetation. But we are very happy with the visual stop that it provides even now before we have climbers planted, since the ye naturally tends to stop at the trellis now rather than the neighbour's house.

Good things: I have discovered the Joy of Jigs. The outfeed support is the durable outcome here, but I used more spacers and temporary supports in this project than any other I have worked on, and I am chuffed to little mint balls with the results. Spacers on the laterals especially made hanging the main trellis framework disturbingly easy.

Bad things: this was a two day project, just, but we would have managed it more handily if we had had a full two days available. Also, we should have hung one more lateral on the trellis. We will probably add this later.

Still, very pleased with how it came out.

Posted by Dunx at June 2, 2008 10:24 AM