I've got a mailbox that's covered by a little house. The roof has started to rot out, and I'm looking at my options to replace it. The plywood below the roof is intact, so replacing the wood strips should be all I need to do.
Would cedar from a cedar fence board be a good choice of material?
Most cedar shingles are tapered, so the thin side can slide under the previous course. I could do this with the table saw, but is there an easy way to prevent constant readjustment of the blade? I'd take a slice at 10-
15 degrees, then the next one would be 0, then back to 10-15 again.
Sure, build it as a regular little roof. You could cut up the cedar or you could use cedar undercourse shingles (I always have a bundle on hand for shims) if you don't want to invest in Perfections.
Another option would be to just roof it with copper, either one piece, two with a ridge cover, or even cut shingles out of the copper and make fish scales. Whack the copper with a hammer to give it some texture.
I would think the easiest method would be to lay felt and use the solid fence boards (without cutting them into small individual shingles). Pencil-in lines outlining a shingle look and carve the lines, lightly, to resemble shingles. Cedar fence boards are soft, hence easy carving. Sonny
How about this: Take your RAS saw or table saw, stick on a wide Dado blade, and tilt the blade 15 degrees. Then make a series of very shallow vertical cuts such that the edge of one cut meets the end of the other. Then take a regular blade, and make thin shallow cuts horizontally every inch or so. This should give a shingle-like effect without any shingles.
I've never made shingles or shakes myself, nor worked with them much, so I can't give any reasonable advice on materials. A chunk of cedar post (or anything cedar) would, at least to my unstudied mind, seem perfect for making cedar things in a general sense.
Couldn't you just set the crosscut guide (preferably with some simple L-shaped jig attached) at 5-7 degrees or so and then, after ripping each shake, flip the stock block end for end? The blade would, of course, stay vertical in this setup.
Sonny wrote in news:b711ff3a-49b3-4dae-aafe- snipped-for-privacy@n21g2000vba.googlegroups.com:
Individual shingles would be a bit much... considering it's a mail box and not a model. (Although I noted a G gauge locomotive would likely fit in the "portal" making it a good candidate for a covered bridge.)
So far I've cut the fence boards in to 1/8" strips, and have begun beveling the edges with my only decent plane.
If the grain orientation doesn't matter rip the bevel on a long strips first (say 6' to 8' long) and then gang cross-cut the pieces to the size desired.
Cedar is good, felt paper (tarpaper/saturable felt) is a very good preparation, because you don't want the damp roof material in contact with the sheathing plywood, that will kill the plywood.
If you make random width boards from the cedar fence slat, and rip to veneer thickness (1/8 inch or so) you can make a very attractive small-scale cedar roof with a stapler, exactly like a full cedar roof. That, or you could thatch it...
I'd recommend staining the cedar; it'll last longer. Real cedar shakes have a lot of bulk, thinner sections will not have comparable lifetime without chemical assistance.
I don't build little mailbox houses any more. The first one was blown up in the middle of the night near the 4th of July. The second one was run over by a tractor trailer.
And my mailbox post was cracked by the teenager up the street first learning to drive. The painted mailbox survived with a few scratches. Anything built around a mailbox either rots or gets invaded by insects. My vote goes for a plain painted mailbox with painted numerals. The painted numerals last 10X longer than the stick on kind and do not rust. Reflectors on a mailbox encourage target practice.
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