First, I want to shout out a big thank you to friend Zach. Zach reads my blog and saw that this site was having difficulty staying live. Zach, being the very good Geek that he is, volunteered to move my blog to another host and server where I might have better results. In the process of starting the move, he did a chat with the current host, DreamHost. During the chat, it was discovered that PageSpeed Optimization, whatever that is, was enabled, and that doesn’t work well with WordPress. They unchecked the box and this site has been up and stable for days now. So thank you Zach for speaking fluent Geek and helping me with this!
Now on to the big roof: In Part 4, we were left with something that looked like this:

It was time to weld that upper left corner of the roof (previous photo) that I have been putting off because of the swarm of bees in the trees. The bees were fewer, but still a threat, so I set up a tarp on a plank. I wormed my way under the tarp and made the weld. The bees didn’t even know I was there:

I thought I was in a B pirate movie; Arrrrrrrrrr, crawl the plank, matey!
Working at the very top of the ladders, I welded the rafters into place. Then Armando and I placed five more roofing panels. I used the sawzall to cut the panel on the angle:

Armando screwed the edge of the panel to the beam.
At this point the roof looks like this:

The next part of this Big Roof task is to frame the roof over the roof deck on container #1. This involves raising this long beam above the outside edge of container #1:

I decided to sit the beam on four 2″x2″ columns, and these 2x2s will be integrated into the railing that will go around the deck. You can see the columns welded into place in the next photo. You can also see that I have moved the beam closer to where it will go, set up a ladder at the right end of the container, and am assembling a scaffolding at the left end of the container:

Now we have arrived at an interesting (difficult, dangerous, and dumb-if-I-do-it-wrong) point. I have to balance the heavy beam on top of the 2×2 columns and weld it into place. Hmmmm. That’s not going to happen with just Armando and me. With metal against metal, the beam could too easily end up on the ground and I hate it when that happens. So what I decided to do was to cut four square 2″x2″ (plus a whisker) holes in the bottom of the beam; the beam will then just slip over the columns and give me all the time in the world to weld the beam to the columns.
I moved the beam a bit closer to its final resting point and called Armando into play. In the next photo I explain the process to him: we’ll lift the beam onto the top of the scaffold and the ladder and then onto the top of the columns. He, on the scaffolding, will slip the first column into the first hole, and I will keep my end high enough for him to then move and place the second and third columns into their sockets. Then I will drop the beam over the remaining column. Here we go:

Discussing the action plan…

Lifting the beam into the air…

Now my end…

Just a little more…

Today, Armando…

One down…

And another…
And here we admire our handwork:

The beam sits about twelve-feet off the top of the container.
With the beam in place, we can now extend the long, angled beams. Here is the first one:

If you take a closer look you will see that I cut away the top and bottom of the beam so that it would slip into the end of the already-in-place beam and reduce to zero the time Armando would have had to hold it in place while I welded it:

Tab A into socket B, like this:

Here it is all placed in its socket and ready for me to weld it tight:

Now you can see that the roof continues to sweep up into the air. This beam is now 52-feet long!
Rinse and repeat three more times:

Next it is just a matter of welding the rafters into place just as I did on the rest of the roof. Here I have a good start:

I’m beginning to see the end of this Big Roof project. Now I need to weld in the rest of the rafters and then frame the far end of this part of the roof. When it is all framed, I will trim the ends of the beams that are sticking out on the left (above photo) and weld on a 2×6 facia. Armando and I are chomping at the bit to get the last of the roof panels in place. You know what that means? No rest for the weary; time to tackle the Big Floor!
In the mean time, Armando has been building a kitchen onto his house and he needed a door. Manufactured doors can be bought for around a hundred dollars, but that is out of his price range. So he bought three pine boards for fifteen dollars. I helped him cut them to size and assemble the door. Here is the outside of the door:

To take the warping power out of the wood, I made a cut (about one-third of the thickness of the board) down the middle of each of the three boards.
We assembled the three boards with bevel-edged cleats attached with drywall screws. The screws stuck through the other side a little bit so I had him grind them down with the angle grinder:

On this side of each board I made two cuts about a third of the way through the thickness of the board to further control any warpage. Armando was mighty happy and proud to take the door home for his wife’s kitchen. “Better than a store-bought door!” he proclaimed (even if the screw pattern isn’t quite perfect…).
That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by and THANKS AGAIN ZACH!