• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Cladding shrinkage

C

Crispylettuce

New Shoots
Joined
Jan 17, 2016
Messages
91
Reaction score
0
Location
Towcester, Northamptonshire
Hello

I had to build a mini shed earlier this year as a temporary fix, and have been amazed by the amount of shrinkage of the cladding - resulting in some gaps.

This was on treated t+g cladding - nothing special.

The location is quite exposed, south facing, and the past 6 weeks or so of dry weather has definitely dried it out!

When I make something more permanent, how do I avoid a repeat of this?

When I bought the cladding originally it was quite wet and I had left it to dry out for as long as I could and then built with no gaps/spacing going that would be ok.

Thanks.

Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk
 
All I can think of is to make overlaps much greater than you have.
 
Obviously with the T&G you are restricted in that regard, but they were butted as tight as could be when put together. The tongues were about 10mm on a 125 board.

Is there a 'target' max moisture content to make this more predictable? Is jamming a moisture meter in reliable enough?

I think next time ill use featheredge, or possible some vertical boards. I got this T&G dirt cheap and as it is only going to be for fairly short term use I can live with it even though the gaps stare at me every time I walk past!
 
I had the same with featheredge left a 10mm overhang and now have some gaps

Even drying indoors sometimes isnt enough when it gets sun baked

I plan to leave a larger overhang next time may even rout a rebate so i can overlap more

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
 
My sympathies, I reused t&g shiplap that I’d taken from my old shed that was about 20yrs old and well seasoned.
The timber used on the south facing side of my rebuild 2yrs ago has shrunk to leave small gaps!!
The work was carried out during the summer so should have been dry.

Rod
 
I overlapped the cladding on my 'shop by approx 25mm and nailed the board above to clamp the lower board so that it could expand and contract without splitting.

But the advice I was given was at least 25mm overlap to cater for shrinkage.
 
I had shrinkage issues with workshop cladding, both across the width of the boards but also (and much to my surprise) along the length of the boards.

As the other guys have said, make the overlaps as large as possible/practical. I think my overlap was around 40mm on a 250mm wide board and so far I haven't seen any gaps. I dont think there's a practical way to avoid gaps resulting from shrinkage along the length. If you' get any your best bet is to just caulk it with a good quality exterior caulk.
 
If you are able to plan ahead far enough then buy the cladding well before you start and store it so that it can dry out before needed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top