How to Build a Turret roof with the RedX Roof App

There are several ways to calculate the rafter lengths and jack rafter lengths of a turret roof. I'll cover the most efficient method i've found, which uses the RedX Roof App to automatically calculate every measurement.

Measurements needed

The measurements we will need to to enter into the app are as follows, We will go into details on all of these later on.

1. Wall side length

2. Roof Pitch

3. Number of sides

4. Facia overhang

5. Jack rafter spacing

These values are all we need to generate a plan view of our Turret roof, the plan should look similar to the image below

.

Customization

There are a few things we can customize like

- Hip rafter thickness

- Hip rafter depth

- Jack rafter depth

- How deep the birds mouth cut will be

I'll go over what all of those later on in the post, I just want to show you all of the other measurements the app will generate before we get into to many details.

Measurements The App Will Get

The app will generate just about every measurement you can think of and it will also help you visualize all of the measurements by generating an image of every rafter. Let's start with the hip rafter.

Center and Jack Rafters

Similarly to the hip rafter the app will also generate a zoomable image of the centre rafter (colour blue) and all of the rafter details

- A list of every Jack Rafter Length(colour green)

- The bevel angles if you wanted to cut the bevels on your jack rafters.

Lets Go Over The Details

Now that you’ve seen what the app can do let me show you all of the details. First thing that you should know is that you can zoom into any of the rafters to get a closer look at all of the measurements. When you zoom in all the way, to the overhang section of any rafter you will see that there are more measurements to be found.

A good thing to keep in mind is that all of the measurements are to square cuts as you can see, if you are cutting bevels on your rafters its easy nothing changes on the measurements, just make you cut the bevel to the short side.

The Measurements You Enter Into The App

- Roof Pitch: Here you enter the desired roof pitch for your turret roof

- Wall Side Length: Here you enter the wall length of any side. This measurement is from the longest points of the wall, Have a look at the image below.

- Number of Sides: Here you can enter how may sides you want your turret roof to have. This number can be anywhere from 3 to100 sides.

- Overhang Here you enter the distance from the outside of the wall to the the inside of your facia, See image above.

- Rafter Height Above Plate or Fascia Drop: Here you can enter either the Rafter Height Above Plate (see image below) Or the Fascia Drop Measurement (the vertical distance from the top of the fascia to the top of the wall. This can be a positive or negative number)

Height Above Plate

- Rafter Spacing This is the distance from the centre of one jack rafter to the centre of another jack rafter(colour green).

- Common Rafter Depth This is the depth of the common rafter and all of the jack rafters. For example if you where using a 2x6 the rafter depth would be 5 & 1/2 inches.

- Hip Rafter Thickness This is the thickness of the hip rafter. For example if you where using a 2x6 the rafter depth would be 1 & 1/2 inches.

- Hip Rafter Depth This is the depth of the hip rafter.

As of right now these are all of the input measurements and customization that you can do. There might be some changes in the future.

Measurements

Here is a bit of explanation on what some of the measurements mean.

- Total Rafter Length This is the total length of the hip rafter. If you have a look at the topdown plan view you will see that the hip rafter total length is to a square end with out any bevels. So if you are cutting the bevels on your hip rafter keep in mind that the measurements are to the shot side of the bevel.

- Rafter Support Block Depending on your rafter you will either have a rafter support block measurement or a Birds Mouth Depth Measurement.

- Rafter Angle This is the degrees of the plumb cut of the rafter.

Zoom into the rafter to view the details

Save And Load Jobs

Now that you are done creating your plans lets go over how we can Save and load this job to the app for later use.

Saving a Job

Tap on the Save this Job button just above the roof plan, then tap on Name This Job to add a name. Aver that tap on the Save button!

Loading a Job

Tap on the Load A Job button just above the roof plan, then select the job you want to open and then tap on Load.

Print and Share The Plan

Print

Tap on the Print button just above the roof plan, then select the printer you would like to print to.

Export as PDF

Tap on the Share button just above the roof plan. This will create a PDF version of the plan that you can share with other apps. For example you can save the PDF to your phone, email it, or send it in a text.

Save To Photos

Tap on the Save To Photos button just above the roof plan. The app will ask you permission to save the plan to your photos, tap on accept and thats it! The plan will have been saved to your photos.

Conclusion

As you can see the RedX Roof App makes it super easy to get every single measurement and rafter detail to build a Turret Roof. There are lots of other great features like Valley Builder, Rafter Calculator, Hip Rafter Builder, Plywood Angles, Dormer Builder and others...

Do you think this is something that you would use? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks to all of you who made it this far!