Shed Roof Ridge Beam

Determine your desired roof pitch.

Shed roof ridge beam. Framing in a ridge beam in shed roof construction is not hard. However our instructions include making shed rafters with a ridge beam. You don t need a ridge beam but you do need a way to keep the walls from spreading. One collar tie would be enough in your case.

A simple gable shed roof is often built using 2 4 or 2 6 lumber for the rafters and 2 4 for the collar ties. Determining the ridge beam height. Now if you have done any looking around this site you ll quickly see that i am not a fan of using a ridge beam in shed construction. Look at it this way say 40 inch load at the ridge look at your 3 4 sheathed roof as a big 8 ft high 3 8 thick beam laid flat down to a 4 12 slope an eyeball number you better check shows that a less than 1000psi plywood would be sufficient with staggered middle edges and 2x6 rafters to keep em flat however you then have about 6000 pounds of lateral thrust at each end wall to deal with.

A proper beam would have a supporting post at each end. Building trusses on site is easily done for a shed. The difference between them is that a ridge beam is a structural member that bears half of the live and dead loads of the rafters on either side of it but a ridge board is not structural. Yes either a ridge board or a ridge beam is necessary and required by the building code where roof rafters meet at the the center of their span.

Versa lam lvl size chart laminated beam span tables charts. If you know the slope x in 12 you want to use for your roof framing design you can use it along with the run r to determine the height of the ridge beam. Shedme shed roof rafter span. This can be accomplished with collar ties boards spanning the shed at ceiling height or with large gussets further up the rafter slope.

Some shed rafters do not incorporate ridge beams either due to small size or lack of technical know how. The term pitch refers to the slope of the roof. For example if the slope is 4 in 12 and the run is 12 feet the ridge beam height m will be 4 feet. A ridge beam runs the length of the shed roof connecting every pair of rafters.

I always always build trusses. Lawriter oac 4101 8 01 roof ceiling construction. Here s a picture of a gable style shed using a ridge beam.