Bretts Frame and Truss, a Queensland fabricator used Pryda Build software to resolve the comprehensive detailing problems presented by the complex roof design of a massive $3 million Brisbane mansion project. Many truss manufacturers in the industry refused to take up the challenging project.

The client’s brief specified a large U-shaped six-bedroom home enclosing a swimming pool (complete with pool house) and six-car garage underneath. The roof had a Balinese gable design with sweeping curves from a high centre apex. Once the architect AAD Design designed the home to the owner’s specifications, the first challenge was to accurately detail the project.

Queensland Pryda fabricator account manager Ashley Mansfield teamed with Bretts Frame and Truss to detail the project using the latest version of Pryda Build software. Using Pryda Build, Ashley Mansfield was able to impose truss details over the CAD drawings while meeting compliance requirements. Working over four days, he broke the roof into modules and independently detailed each one. The roof trusses were more than five metres high at the centre and had to be manufactured in two sections.

Danny Lake from Bretts Frame and Truss said the roof comprised of 155 trusses measuring more than 45 cubic metres over the three sections in addition to beams and posts. Each wing had three blocks, which were manufactured one at a time, with each block taking 10 hours to complete.

The roof curves had to be made perfectly symmetrical for the battens, which had to be at exactly 170-millimetre centres to accommodate the roof tiles made from recycled car parts that had been turned into a polycarbonate product. The roof trusses had to be manufactured precisely to avoid any deflections in the gutters, fascias and downpipes, which were all made of copper.

Once completed, each block was transported by road to the Chandler building site where builder Geoff Booth from Tara Homes used the massive concrete floor slab as a base for erecting the roof trusses before they were lifted by crane into place onto the timber frame.

The original roof design was first tested on the smaller pool house, which involved only six standard roof trusses with the remainder made using saddles and outrigger trimmers. Once the success of the roof design was confirmed on the pool house, they set to work on the rest of the house beginning with the master bedroom suite, followed by the raked trusses of the lounge and dining rooms, then the left wing with bedrooms one to five and the centre section with its curved tunnel ceiling, and finally the right wing.

The curved ceiling incorporates $7000 of fibre optic lighting to deliver a ‘starry, starry night’ theme complete with shooting stars and lit planets.

Geoff Booth said he could not have completed the job, which took three months alone to finish the frame and roof truss erection, without the active assistance of Bretts Frame and Truss and Pryda experts who impressed from the first meeting and were in constant communication throughout the entire project. He was also impressed with the flexibility and capabilities of the latest Pryda Build software to deal with such a large and complex roof design.