I LOVE homemade  pie, fresh baked bread and rice pudding.

I am not much of a fan of homemade roof trusses however.

That is not to say that they cannot be made properly.  In fact all trusses when they were first invented were “homemade”—-that is, made on site.  I have even built them myself, and they can actually be stronger than manufactured trusses from a factory.  The key is that there has to be some understanding of how trusses work and what they are capable of doing, what they need to be able to do—–and they need to be built to meet the needs of the span they are crossing.

Current regulations require that all trusses be “engineered”—-whether site built or factory built.  It is likely to be more cost effective to go with the factory built ones.  Most of the time, it is not possible to even buy the truss materials for what a truss manufacturer will deliver them to your site for—-including hoisting them to where they will be installed.

So why would anyone build them themselves?  Well, in the case of the ones pictured below, it was probably because the second story addition to the garage was done without permits in “the middle of the night.”  Considerable sagging of the roof was evident and can be seen if you look at the very last truss and see how the bottom of the truss is not parallel to the top plate of the end wall (lets not even talk about the framing around the window).

There are WAY better things to be doing in the middle of the night!

***

Charles Buell, Seattle Home Inspector

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