Dovetail Details: Under the Eaves
Looking under the eaves at our House in the Woods, designed by mwworks and built by us.
Our site teams—coupled with our custom wood and metal shops—frequently collaborate with architects and designers to build special parts of each project. Our House in the Woods contains a custom eave assembly that is unique to the overall design and required high-level collaboration across the entire team, including mwworks, the Dovetail site team, the Dovetail Wood and Metal shops, PCS Structural Solutions, and a specialty fabricator out of Colorado, Kerr Panel Manufacturing.
For the scope of the aluminum eave brackets, the design intent included fabricating a series of knife blade eave panels, requiring the fabrication to take into consideration limitations on weight distribution, ability to retain high levels of precision, and to function as a gutter assembly.
Collaboration with the design team entailed developing a constructable assembly while satisfying uplift requirements, constructability issues, and installation logistics. Developing a fully adjustable bracket assembly ensured the precision required for overall success of the detail and design intent. To achieve this scope, dialed in shop drawings allowed for the CNC’d placement jigs to be utilized for perfect alignment of the bracketry, aluminum panels, gutter assembly, and soffits.
The aluminum panels were made by Kerr Panel Manufacturing out of Denver, who specialize in creating lightweight honeycomb aluminum panels. These panels are made of custom-sized, press-broke aluminum with a honeycomb-style core, complete with blind taps for blind fasteners. The end panels are double cantilevered off meticulously made aluminum brackets fabricated by Dovetail and positioned with CNC’d placement jigs on site. Rigorous panel testing occurred in Denver to ensure all span criteria were met, and their perfect fit upon arrival was a major achievement for our team.
