Ridge Beam Metal Plate

In the hustle to get the building covered, John and I joined the two sections of the ridge beam with plywood gussets and moved on to more pressing tasks. Now that I've been framing some of the walls under the roof that partition the interior and exterior space, I realized that it was time to finalize that connection with metal plates serving as the gussets. Otherwise I would risk blocking off access to the temporary gussets and wouldn't be able to get the metal installed in its place.

My friend Colby has a metal shop two blocks from my house where he and several other metalsmiths do hand forging and welding, so I rolled up there on my bike and found him and Haley keepin' it real. They found me a pair of thick plates almost exactly the size that I needed, and Haley set me up on the drill press. Haley was good enough to tack weld the plates together so I could put four holes through both of them at once and have everything all lined up.. A good guy, that Haley. He even ground the tacks off with an angle grinder when I was finished drilling. A few minutes later I was back on my bike trying not to fall over while clutching two heavy metal plates in one hand and the handlebars in the other. Above is a photo of the plate bolted in place. I had wanted to line up the holes so I could attach the two plates with through bolts, but I found some long lag bolts lying around my shop and decided to use those instead. They're plenty strong, and I didn't have to worry about drilling perfectly straight holes in the beams to keep the alignment true. Anyhow, the ease of running over and custom fabricating a structural metal gusset made me really grateful to live so close to such a cool metal shop, and so I wrote this post and put the AMA's link here: Austin Metal Authority. They're great, you should check 'em out.