Solar Power Day 22

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas. I got snowed in pretty good! It’s a full blown winter wonderland outside and I am loving it!

The pergola crew returned this morning around 9:30 with three crewmembers in tow to resume work on the privacy fence. Two tasks needed to be accomplished: finish wrapping the tops of the 8x8 posts in pressure treated CDX, and rip down some of the Douglas Fir 2x4s into 2x2s. Each of the 2x4s that were delivered were roughly 20 feet long, so three of them were rough cut into 6-foot long boards, giving us the eight that we needed plus some extra if any mishaps happened during milling.

Each of these 2x4s were about six feet long

The first step was to rip these in half. I decided on 1 5/8 since these were actually 1 3/4 thick boards to start, and the extra 1/8 over 1 1/2 would give us some extra surface area with the countersink holes later on.

Once ripped I then ran each piece through the table saw again to square them up.

As a footnote each of these 2x4s had some residual ice and snow on them from Winter Storm Elliot. We scraped everything as clean as we could get them, which was enough to ensure no deflection happened while sawing, however each board had a number of wet spots. To make sure nothing tripped the brake in my saw, I did everything in Bypass Mode. I kept an eye on the computer box after each pass through the saw and thankfully it never registered any conditions that would otherwise have tripped the brake.

He was somewhat enamored with how thin a shaving was leftover from squaring up the 2x2s

With the 2x2s ripped to size the next step was to put a 45-degree chamfer on one edge. Since I was doing this solo today I don’t have any pictures of the process, but I do have a pic of the piece of scrap I was using to dial in the size of the chamfer.

The next step was to drill countersunk holes in a specific pattern for the 2x4 slats. The outer 2x2s would have holes drilled every 5 1/2 inches that would secure the 2x2 to either a corner post or a 6x6 center post, with two more countersunk holes drilled perpendicularly above and below the first set that would allow for long screws to secure the 2x4 and inner 2x2. The inner 2x2 would have just the countersunk holes drilled every 5 1/2 inches to secure the inside 2x2s to the corner and center posts.

View of 2x2 screw locations from the outside

View of 2x2 screw locations from the inside

Fence sections assembled

After setting my countersink bit to the deepest countersink setting we started drilling. However partway through this we noticed that the measurements seemed very off. We used a piece of scrap 2x4 and what we thought was a two inch spacer to mark the screw locations. Turns out that spacer was only 1 3/4 and we didn’t catch that until after we started drilling. Indeed “measure twice, cut once” applies here, but this definitely goes a step further when you have to measure your measuring devices. Rather than show a picture of the erroneous pieces we drilled I’ll show a correctly drilled one in my next post.

The mistake we made certainly wasn’t the end of the world. We only ended up wasting one piece and we had enough spare material for at least four more if needed. But this did lead to us being much more thorough and meticulous in measuring and marking everything prior to drilling. But before we could go any further we ran out of time for the day.

While one of the crew and I were busy in the shop making 2x2s all afternoon, the others finished wrapping three out of the four corner posts in pressure treated CDX and marking up the corner and center posts for the 2x4 locations.

This day actually closed with a bit of a surprise, but it’s not too bad. The Douglas Fir 2x4s were delivered in two orders because of a mixup when materials were ordered several months ago. As a result we had a pile of 2x4s that actually measured 1 3/4 inches thick instead of 1 1/2, and then another much larger pile of boards at the correct thickness. So tomorrow my planer will get a little workout again. It’s nowhere near as much of an ordeal as is planing down one of the reclaimed Douglas Fir boards, but it’s still an extra step that we didn’t foresee. Again, no big deal.

With any luck we’ll finish the fence tomorrow. See you next time.