Instead I accepted that I would need to spend this Saturday (and some of Sunday) preparing all the materials.

This is a large and complicated stud frame and needs a lot of design and construction time.

During the week I did have the chance to calculate all the stud positions and height of the door header.

I needed to take in to account : the eventual second layer of floor boards, a possible threshold, and door jambs.

I also managed to plane and thickness 3 sides of the header beams (2 of 45 x 185 x 1820).

My thicknesser could not quite handle the 185 mm side and this was a job for the table saw first thing on Saturday morning.

I applied "Liquid nails" liberally, clamped and then nailed the two boards together to create the door header.

This still needs cutting to exact size but I will wait until the trial stud fitting is ready for taking dimensions from.

Next I needed to carefully mark up the top and bottom plates and run this through the dado saw blade on the radial arm saw.

After a lunch break I started work on setting out the stud frame.

I reached the point of establishing studs for either side of the door frame and measuring up dimensions for the secondary door stud and the width of the header.

This is where I needed to stop when Saturday evening arrived.

Hopefully on Sunday I can complete the cutting and trial fitting of all the components.

Sunday

The work today exposed a bit of a dilemma.

I needed to neatly and precisely trim the door header (90 x 185).

I have an old 1970's Dewalt Radial Arm Saw that would do the job in seconds.

However, that is set up with a dado blade for trenching the top and bottom plates and I am loathe to change the blade over or lose the settings I have established on it.

I also have a $65 drop saw - but this needs two cuts to completely penetrate through the entire width of the timber.

This made me think about my 20 year old Triton Mark III.

I pulled it out of storage, cleaned it up and reinstalled the power saw.

Alas - at 90 mm thickness the saw does not have sufficient depth of cut and I ended up having to flip the piece of timber on to its other face to complete the cut.

It did a neat enough job (with about 2 degrees error on the angle of the cut) but still not an easy solution.

I will have to think about this - I certainly am not going to spend $300 on a sliding radial arm saw.

After cutting the header piece to size I dropped it in to position and was then able to cut the short studs that run from the header to the top plate.

After this it was about an hour's work to cut the remaining 2685 studs (5 of).

Each of these needs to be hand measured and cut to fit the vagaries of the plate trenching - I found variations of between -1 and + 7 mm in the required lengths.

I then marked up every single stud and dismantled the frame ready for painting all parts.

I will do this during the week ready for on site assembly next Saturday (unfortunately rain predicted at this stage).

Once again the frame was covered by magpies come to cadge an evening feed.