Timber canopy advice please

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Hello again

To go over the impending new front door I want to build a canopy, the design is a straight forward flat canopy (roughly 18" projection from the house) with pillars either side (instead of brackets) that go to ground level - projection of the pillars roughly 13".

I would link to a picture but I can't find the exact one I found a few months ago :roll:

The canopy part is timber/ply construction dressed up with a moulding round the outer edges, membrane or felt topped with a through gutter outlet etc etc.

The pillars is where I'm stuck, I don't want to do brick/block as I'm **** at it and no one seems interested in doing such a small job. That leaves me with timber pillars, tiny stud walls clad with... Hmm... Redwood/pine treated with a preservative and then painted??
If I went with that how should I do the corner joints? A long mitred edge would surely open up in short order?

Any thoughts on those?

Thanks :)
 
If for example you wanted 8" square pillars I would laminate up a bunch of planed up 8 x 1" boards to form the pillar. Use a decent w/p glue and loads of clamps. Alternate the grain etc and you should be good.

Someone else will no doubt come along in a moment and give an excellent reason why thats not such a good idea though. :?
 
One way to do this is clad with 18mm tricoya mdf.

to disguise butt joints, chamfer all external long edges. Then machine a V groove 18mm in from the edge of the wider sides. On all 4 edges you have a corner detail, one being a joint and one being a dummy.

Gluing up form solid is certainly an option, you may find that the joints telegraph through the paintwork slightly.

Or go rustic and buy some 6" or 8" oak posts.
 
Aha! Thank you for the replies :)

The pillars will be approx 13" x 6 to 8", I really hadn't thought of doing them as a solid lump - don't know why?

Oak posts would be dressing mutton as lamb for my house but thanks for the suggestion.

Making a feature of the joint, hadn't thought of that either! I will have to price the tricoya, from memory of threads on here it's fairly expensive.

Is the redwood definitely a no no for this project?

I might be able to combine a couple of methods here. Rather than build a stud pillar and clad it I might be able laminate together some 9x1 (for example) to make sides of a box. I can create rebates for the corner joints by glueing different widths of board together, v groove the joints as suggested.

Hmm, what do you think?
 
I suppose the simplest method would be to form the pillars with 2 vertical studs, say 5 x 2. Cut 2 strips of sheet material 13" wide and screw together to make a box. Clad with 6mm tricoya or renderboard. If you could make it 12" you would only need one sheet.

You may have to screw a stud to the wall first before screwing the box together.
 

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