11 Attachment(s)
Ticking stick. The most useful tool you've never heard of
Ever heard of a 'ticking stick'?
Today is a day of house-keeping and the job of the day is to fit some flashing to a shed.
When I built the front pergola it overlapped with an existing garden shed and the roof of this shed has a habit of directing some rain water back under the pergola.
I added a colorbond roof over the shed which runs up to meet the gutter of the pergola and to finish it off I need to add two barge flashings and an apron flashing over the gutter.
Attachment 537897
You can see it's quite a complicated profile I need to cut on the end of the barge flashings so it tucks neatly under the gutter and up to the pergola bearer. It's not a simple scribing set out because the cut marks need to be offset downwards parallel to the flashing because the cut barge flashing will slide in but also up into the final position.
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I decided to use a 'ticking stick'. It's a very old tool, thousands of years probably. It's the wooden stick with an odd shape you can see in the photos. You can use it to transfer a complicated shape onto a piece of paper or a board and reproduce the shape onto the thing you want to cut to fit - it might be carpet or lino or sheet material or in my case, tin flashing.
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I taped the transfer paper to the barge flashing so the top edges align. I point to important points on the profile and draw an outline around the ticking stick on the paper.
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This is what the transfer paper looks like when point transfer is complete.
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The paper is moved along the barge flashing so that the longest point falls on the tin. Then it's just a matter of placing the ticking stick back inside the outlines and drawing a point on the material where the end of the stick falls.
Attachment 537903
It helps to have one of these profile gauges for the curves too.
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The first barge flashing is complete
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The other barge flashing with the marks transferred to the paper and the final result
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Have a job where you need to fit something into a complicated pattern? Think of the ticking stick. Thanks for looking.
