When I started out as a framing contractor, I was often faced with complex roof structures that dwarfed my knowledge and experience. To weave through that seemingly impenetrable forest of rafters, I wished for a gray-bearded master carpenter to float over my job and plop down the brass ring of roof framing. He never showed up, so I had to read a few books and cut a lot of lumber. Eventually I got a fairly good feel for putting roofs together. Back then, I used the tried-and-true Full Length Roof Framer by A.F.J. Reichers to figure out my rafters. Short on text (12 pages) but long on span tables, generations of
Roof Calculations Simplified
The Construction Master calculator takes some of the head scratching out of cutting a hip roof
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