First Bent Up!!

Yesterday I got the first bent up for the Sawmill shed. The day started out slowly with our goats deciding that they were no longer interested in staying in their designated field space. Caroline was home alone and had an appointment to show property so she was a bit concerned about the situation. Fortunately I had just left and could come back home and beat the little critters. Just kidding. After a number of attempts to convince that they should hang out where they were suppose to be I finally moved them up to the winter quarter area above the house. Fortunately they have not escaped as of yet. As I'm writing this their lower field has been taken over by the turkeys. There are about 20 of them roaming around down there.


As far as the bent is concerned, I used the pallet forks on the tractor to hold up the sections of rafter and get them hooked into the hardware. It worked pretty well with little lifting involved. I then squared it up by measuring the diagionals (thanks to that old Greek Pythagoras) and put on the braces. Last time we tried to raise the frame the nails I used for the braces were obviously too short. I had much longer ones this time.

I then hooked up our homemade boom and attached it to the strap I had around the top of the rafter. The boom worked great, lifting the bent with little trouble. The bent did a little bit of jerking due to operator malfunction as I got to the top of the arc. I then got off the tractor, checked the sides for plumb, and put on braces and screwed in the bolts at the bottom of the post. The picture to the left is after I had things braced.

The tricky part was getting the top of the boom rested against the top of the bent after I braced it so that I could climb up the ladder to unhook all the straps. Fortunately the climb went well and as you can see by the second picture the bent is now freestanding. An interesting day all in all.

It's raining off and on today so I'm not sure how much we will get accomplished today. I think now that I have some idea on how to do things we should be able to get the two additional bents we have ready to go up in a couple of hours. We'll see.

It should also be interesting getting the purlins up on the rafters. It sure looks high once the bent is stood up.