Saturday, December 31, 2011

High Tunnel Progress - Rafters and Purlins

We've been flying on the high tunnel.  Since this winter has been so mild, once the kids got their Christmas break we jumped on putting up the high tunnel frame.  We had the ground posts setup going into the fall, so we didn't have to deal with sinking posts and instead concentrated on building the rafters and placing them into the ground posts.  We were able to putting up two out of the four purlins.  I had a fire call which took me away from the project for several hours and when I came back the kids had nearly completed the pair of purlins.  They had figured out a process that worked for them that was actually faster than what we were doing when I was working with them.  Guess dad doesn't always know the best way to do everything.  Speaking of making changes, I spoke with one of the other growers in the county who said that there is a fifth purlin that goes along the top of the frame to combat snow load, so I'll contact the manufacturer and try to order that.  I also spoke to my neighbor to the south who's made some modifications to his high tunnel based on hard lessons learned, which I'll try to copy also.  The only problem that I can see right now is that we have a set of posts that have heaved and moved about 3 or 4 inches away from the other posts.  They are tied together by a single board and are out quit a bit beyond spec.  I'll try to strap them together to a set of other posts to see if I can pull them back in, but if worse comes to worse, I assume I'll have to dig the posts out and pull them over and this time connect the base boards together with the other posts.  We're not planning on putting the plastic on until spring, so we have time...

No comments:

Post a Comment