WE'RE IMPROVISING! - Setting Top Trusses + Finishing Frame (Airstream Carport Step 4)

Welcome back to the fourth episode in our Airstream carport series or as we're calling it our airport. Yes remember this is a metal truss building that will cover our Airstream while we build our house. Now this is the fourth part in the series like you said there are three videos before this the first one is the planning and design video the second is the concrete slab and the third is putting the vertical columns into place and that brings us to today. What are we doing today? Well today we're putting the top metal trusses into place. Like we've said before this is a metal truss building that has been custom designed and pre-fabricated. I said it. Got it. Yeah pre-fabricated by our friends over at Miracle Truss. They're super DIY friendly and this particular step is really where we took their suggestions for how to put this building together and we had to get a little creative. We did. So let's see what happens. Good morning. Good morning. Today is an eventful day already. We got a call this morning my truck's broke we can't make it we're not gonna put the trusses up. Should we give a little backstory on the whole crane situation? Yeah let's do that. Okay so usually when you're putting up a building like this you would rent what's called a telehandler. Basically it's a big off-road vehicle with a large extending arm that goes up and down. And a bucket. Well usually it has forklifts on it. And a bucket. Sometimes bucket. Anyway. Anyway. It's a big piece of equipment and we can't get it. Right you use that to set the top pieces into place and every place around us that we call is completely out of these. They're rented out they don't know when they're going to get them back. We thought we were going to have to wait a couple of months to even put this thing together because we couldn't find this equipment to rent. But we found our neighbor he's like I think we can make this work. So he had a crane truck and he's gonna bring it over this morning. And then it broke. And then it broke. And we thought well we're not doing it and then we rented all this other equipment that we're gonna need. And picking up the scissor lift tomorrow yeah. But then he just called back he's got another truck he may be able to use that. So fingers crossed he's gonna bring it over we'll see how it goes. But before he comes over with that truck we really need to install the x-bracing on the bottom middle bays. Or wind bracing. It has a few different names. X-bracing or wind bracing we'll be calling it either. Yeah it's two large uh poles essentially with threads on the end. We're gonna make sure that at least the bottom ones here are put on before he comes over. And that everything is where it needs to be. That will help keep all these the four columns on each side from shifting too much when we go to put the rafters on. Right it'll strengthen everything kind of sturdy it up. Let's just show you. Let's just do it. It's gonna be easy. Yeah like I told Jet. No problem we'll do it real quick. And he laughed at me because he knows by now. He knows how it goes. With the x-bracing or wind bracing you can call it either one. Now that it's in place it's time to set the top trusses. Thanks to the instructions from Miracle Truss we knew we needed a few items for things to go smoothly. Heavy duty strapping to lift the trusses. Heavy duty rope to attach to each side so we could help guide the truss while in the air. And pry bars or drift pins to line up the holes. Then it's just a matter of setting that truss into place, lining up the holes, setting the bolts, tightening the nuts with the washers. Yeah and similar to when we put the vertical columns up, once you get two of the top trusses in place then you want to go back with your purlins and connect those so that it starts to strengthen and connect the whole building together as you go down the line. At this point we're not tightening everything to torque specific hand type specifications. But we will get to that in a minute. And also even when we put the purlins in we're only putting in one or two bottom screws. We're not tightening everything up again. We're trying to save as much time as possible because we are paying by the hour to have equipment brought in or by the week or whatever. Like we want to save that time. But also this allows it to be more flexible for when we get to plumbing. Yes. Not plumbing. Plumbing. Plumbing this way. We'll get to it later. I'm sorry. Hey it's disclaimer time. Yes we are DIYers. We are not professionals. The methods used to construct this building may not be the methods that you choose. And they may not even be the methods provided by Miracle Truss. Use common sense and what works for you. Also the next couple of steps do involve sort of job site heavy equipment machinery that we may or may not be using in the correct way. There's probably some safety protocols that we should have adhered a little closer to. Again we're DIYers not professionals. And sometimes you just have to make do with what you have. We were in a hurry. We had a lot to do. Read your manuals and be careful. Finally we have to say that while Miracle Truss is not sponsoring this build we are working with them. We're using some of the video that we're creating during this process to make some marketing materials for them to help offset the cost. Otherwise we're paying for everything else. We do have an affiliate relationship with them. So if you say hey I want a Miracle Truss building like those tiny shiny home guys and you tell them then we'll get a small commission. That was a lot of disclaiming. Can we be done disclaiming? Yeah. Okay. Disclaiming or disclaimering? Which one? I like disclaimering. I think that's great. Okay. Remember we needed a telehandler. We couldn't find one to rent. No. Then a crane truck was supposed to come this morning. Then it broke. And now a bucket truck is coming at the last minute. Man we're getting really good at improvising. We are. Also let's hope this works. Can we just talk for just a minute about how fast this is going up? This is very this is a strange feeling for us. We are not used to this. We're used to building with earth bags and it taking three months to get to a point like this. Not two days. No. Yeah. I like it. All in all setting those top truss pieces in place only took like two to three hours. Yeah. We even had time to go to Talking Irons and get snacks and drinks. Which is always a good day. Yeah. Let's talk about safety. Okay. Because this was definitely one of the most dangerous things we've ever done I think building out here. Don't you think? Yeah. Lifting how much you think they weigh? Three or four or five hundred pounds? I think probably three or four. Yeah. Of metal way high up in the air. So we made sure that the straps we bought were really heavy duty. They were rated way over you know what they actually weighed. And we made sure no one was standing under those trusses. Of course I mean I had to get under them. Yeah. You know to get up there and bolt them in place. But I made it I like I waited until the last possible minute to get up there. Yeah. Other than that I mean what like hard hats? Should we've had hard hats? Steel toed boots? I'm not sure how much a hard hat would help with a 500 pound metal truss. Yeah. I think you're kind of screwed either way. But it probably would have been good to have them. Yeah. In case you know something else fell. Right. Other things could have fallen. But we were very careful. We were very careful. And we made sure the kids were very careful. We had a long talk about everything beforehand. Yeah for sure. We should have recorded that. Yeah we should have. Anyway. Oh well. I will say too that the bucket truck actually worked really well for this installation. Yeah. I'm glad that the crane truck. I mean I'm not glad for the guy that the crane truck broke. But I am glad for our project that we ended up using the bucket truck. Because he was able to maneuver it a lot more than he would have been able to with just the crane. Yeah and this is on us. We really should have had that scissor lift here for this step. Yeah. Our scaffolding and our ladders did not reach up to the peak. And we really needed to install those purlins at the top to tie it all together. It would have made things a lot simpler. Yeah. But we still we still were able to get it done. We were. Yeah he was able to maneuver in there and help put those top purlins on for us. So now we know next time have that scissor lift there earlier in the process. And we tried. It just didn't work. Some stuff it just it didn't work out. So one last thing. I have to say that those drift pins 100 percent made a huge difference. Yeah. I don't know that you could have done it without them. Because when that top truss is setting on the columns you really do need to make those fine-tune adjustments to be able to get that bolt through. And I'm really glad you bought that. You can't like push it and then get the bolt. Like there's only so much you can do. They're pretty heavy. Yeah it's very awkward. So definitely grab yourself some drift pins. It will make the job much easier. So tomorrow I go pick up the scissor lift. Speaking of. We're gonna get working on leveling and squaring and plumbing everything and putting all the purlins in. And of course immediately after you got back with the scissor lift we got rained out. Of course. Monsoons of 2022. Thank you very much. Now I'll be honest these next few steps are a little fuzzy for me because it was like non-stop up and down on the scissor lift. Back and forth all over the place tightening and retightening and fixing one thing and changing the other thing. The goal was get everything level, plumb, and square. But there's so many ways to do it. Yeah. You can actually put washers under the columns if you need to get them. Yeah that's for like if your cement pad is slightly uneven. You can do that. You can because nothing's tightened together yet the middle of those top trusses are actually still flexible right here. So you can pull those like you have to undo your purlins but you can still pull and push that a little bit. Then like you said apparently you can do all this stuff with the x-bracing which we didn't realize until the last minute and it still breaks our brains. Until like day three. Anyway. We're not going to explain how to use the cross bracing because I don't think we could explain it very well. I can just say this. Okay. If you were going to like say that okay here's the cross bracing. If you need to tighten one side up here you really need to loosen the opposite side. Otherwise you just start like pulling things. Yeah. If you're going to tighten one side loosen the opposite side. And it helps if you make a mark on the thread so you know how far you've moved too. Yeah. We learned that. Yeah. But hey guess what? Now we know how to square a building using x-braces. It only took three days. Well this is a problem. You cannot be in there. You will get crushed. Come on man. Let's go. We got work to do. Get out of there. Oh my gosh. 36 one and a half. Close enough. Okay we're working on getting this last truss. It needs to be pushed out just a little bit so that it's it's plumb. Guys my safety measures for you. Nobody stands in this bay because when we loosen these some of these boards could fall. Also don't stand on the outside of the building because that's the board that will fall the easiest. So stay on the corner outside that way. Cool. Thumbs up. Okay. We got our base purlins all in the right spot. We used the x-bracing to square the roof on both sides of the pitch. So everything is good. Now we just got to tighten everything down. All the bolts need to be tightened. We need to put all the rest of the screws and the purlins and then we should be ready to come back and install the rest of the purlins after that. All right we finally got everything tightened up. So now we just have the rest of the purlins that we need to put in. Everyone else is gone today so it's just me and Jett. Hey Jett. So he's going to hand the boards up to me. I'm going to put them in place. Screw them in. Let's get it done. It's time to put in the cord bracing. So these are angled brackets that they send you with some nuts and bolts. So we're going to bolt one side in to the actual truss. There's already holes drilled for you. And then the other end you're going to take some screws and screw that directly into the purlins. So that makes sort of a cross-directional brace from the truss to the purlins. It'll make more sense once we get up there. The way these work is we got a bolt and a nut. We're going to bolt them here. Then we're going to slide them up into place here and screw them into the purlins. That's pretty much it. The only other thing about the cord bracing is that they need to alternate. So you can see that far one is on this side of the truss. Then this one goes to the other side and then this one is back on this side. So you just got to keep alternating on the middle ones. Obviously the end ones they're all going to come in. But that's the other important thing is you have to alternate these cord braces. Also watch out for x-bracing because apparently you got to get it around. Let's see if I can go. I didn't think about that one. So much happened in this video. Let's do a little recap. Okay so first up we had to set those top trusses into place using a bucket truck instead of a crane truck instead of a telehandler. We had to bolt those together all hand tight and then we had to bring the scissor lift in. We had to plumb and level and square everything. Again I'll just say I feel like putting the trusses in place was actually pretty easy. I was really worried it was actually the plumbing and leveling and squaring that drove us bananas. It took forever and like I said the scissor lift up and down and then I think part of the problem too is when we put those top trusses into place we were in a hurry and so the guy helping us was putting in those purlins but they weren't quite in the right spot and so then the trusses were off and we had to read undo stuff and fix it. It's not like you can undo one board and move it you have to undo the chain down the line. All of them yeah because the truss isn't going to move until you undo all of them. Yeah it's a whole thing just make sure you get it right the first time. Yeah and then after we got everything in place then it was time to go tighten everything down with a torque wrench with a torque wrench with a big yeah big wrench make sure it all was going to stay where it needed to be. Anyhow we figured it out we got it tightened up yep and then we had to go back and put all the purlins on uh-huh so that means we are ready for the next step which is the step that we've been dreading from day one guys it's metal roof time when we metal roof we don't get along very well it's no good no it's no good at all there's a lot of fighting there's a lot of yelling there's a lot of ignoring there's a lot of yelling well there's a lot of frustration yeah we'll put it that way okay yeah uh so yeah stick around for that one that's gonna be fun because that's what's coming up next yeah yeah okay we'll see you then but you make it worth it oh you're worth it to me something that you do to me you take me over i'm stuck on your view for you to come away now that you're here why don't you stay