 Structural awnings or sunshades are becoming very popular. You'll notice them on a lot of commercial buildings and homes. They add beauty and also protection from the UV and elements. There are many different shapes and sizes and also materials that you may use. Hi, I'm Matt Grant standing on Sailrite's loft floor. And if you look down, you'll see a masking tape outline of a structural awning. This happens to be a fairly small structural awning or it will be a structural awning once we lay the fabric out. What a structural awning is, is there are sometimes called sail shades. Basically it is any awning that is suspended either from a structure or from a series of poles that are put in the ground in order to provide shade or water protection. This video shows you essentially how to put any structural awning together. Apart from what we give you in the video though we haven't discussed a few things. And that would be what material to use. So we'll start with that. You can certainly use umbrella materials for structural awnings. They give you great colors, great water resistance and they're very durable. If you want something entirely watertight, you could use a vinyl material like Stamwhite. If you just want something that provides shade and no water protection, you could use materials like fiber tags that are available in great colors. And again, extremely durable would allow air to come through nicely and they look great. So what you want to think about when you select the material is, does it need to be watertight? How heavy can it be? How durable does it need to be? How durable does it need to be? And then if you need help making a selection based upon your level of criteria call sail right and we'll be happy to help you figure out what materials best for your application. Let's go back to our tape outline. A couple of things I want to point out. This particular awning will be attached to a hard structure along this edge. This edge will utilize awning rope. This is the Ketter awning rope and you can see we've soared it onto the Sunbrella fabric. This is just a sample piece and we created a small single him here at the edge and then used a zigzag stitch to sew the Sunbrella onto the awning rope. And then you just take the awning rope and slide it into the awning track. This is the Anodized Aluminum Track that works great for awning applications like this. So for this edge we will end up making it entirely straight. The other three edges are going to be flying free. In other words, no support except for the fact that there will be a post at this corner and there will be a post at the park corner over here. When we figure the size of the awning or the placement of the posts we want to make sure that the stress line or what I'll call the sheep position is bisecting, roughly bisecting the corner. So in this case our post is going to want we're going to want to have our position of our post extend off of this line roughly. This illustration shows the post in the correct spot. If we were to have the post here for instance what would happen or in line in this line what would happen is we would get great tension upon this edge. If the post removed to this incorrect spot you would likely get a sag here. So again roughly bisect your angles and then you'll get tension on both edges and you should have a nice setting structural awning. So in this corner we're going to have a bisection of the angle roughly like this. So here you can see this post is positioned correctly. A triangular structural awning will have it sheeting angle come to the midsection of the opposite edge. Okay so we know roughly where to position the posts. Obviously the posts have to be pretty solidly positioned in the ground because even though awnings can be fairly small in size they're still a good deal of force on them especially if they get water, capture water or the wind is blowing hard. So what you might want to do besides just anchoring a post in concrete is you may actually want to have a stay wire coming off of the top and out in a direction that again mimics that sheeting angle from the corner in order to structurally reinforce the post. But that's up to you to figure out and they're all kinds of ways to do that. Now once you have the posts in the ground and you figured out what size you want for the structure the next thing that you need to do is figure out whether an edge needs a hollow to it and how much hollow to put on that edge. So again with our example here this edge is up against a straight edge in other words it's attached to a home and we're going to have an awning that slides into a groove on this edge so we don't have to worry about structural or hollows on that edge. But these other edges that are free we have to worry about how much hollow to put on the edge. A good rule of thumb is to take the measurement and feet and multiply it by 12 to get it in inches and then multiply that by anything between say 4 and 6% and whatever you get that number will be the rough estimate for the amount of hollow you should have along the edge. So if I talk about hollow if this edge was to have say 10 inches of hollow where my toe is here you would want to take a flexible a baton or a flexible piece of wood and you would want to attach it at the two corners and then bend the center out to this 10 inch mark. And at that point then we want to strike a new line down either on our floor surface or on the actual fabric in order to get a nice curve with the maximum depth of the curve at the halfway point along the edge. So we have the curvature we basically have the two dimensional shape we have our post position the only thing we haven't talked about now is whether the structure should be suspended so that it's completely horizontal or whether it needs to be set at an angle. If you set this completely horizontally you better make sure that you're using a material that allows water to run through because even if you put an appropriate amount of hollow on the edges it's still going to sag in the center you're still going to collect moisture and it will pocket in the center and not be good if it's a mesh material run through the ground worry about that. So if you're going to use a waterproof material what you want to do is you want to lower one or more corners so that you get some runoff just the way you would in roofing the home. So at least make sure that you produce at the very minimum a two foot rise from one extreme corner to another in order to make sure that you have appropriate runoff. It's usually necessary to lay out your pattern on a large floor use a school gym floor or church gym floor and then use masking tape and tape measures to lay out your pattern. By applying masking tape to the floor you can come out with the exact pattern you need for your sun shade awning. You can see here in this illustration the panels are on top of the masking tape. Remember to add extra material for your double hem around the perimeter. We usually add two and a quarter inches for the double hem. We've also rotated or nested the panels to utilize the least amount of fabric possible. When the patterns have been cut we usually label them so they can identify them easily. To prepare each panel for sewing we'll apply double sided tape or basting tape to each one of the seam lines. We'll baste each one of these panels together and then sew it up. The basting tape makes it a lot easier to sew because your panel doesn't move on you while you're sewing. After a pair of panels are basted together take it to the sun machine and sew a straight stitch down each one of the edges. This is an overlapping seam. No need to do any special seam and overlapping seam works great. We often use a 3-quarter inch seam allowance or a 1-inch seam allowance and that only really requires two rows of a straight stitch down each one of these seams. Be sure to use the longest stitch length your sewing machine is capable of. After sewing all panels together we'll concentrate on the patch assembly at the corners. Take a length measurement of each one of the edges. Each one of the patches should be 10% of that length on that particular edge. So take the length measurement and then do 10% for the largest patch. The awning in this video is fairly small so we're going to take two layers of a dacron patch with the original fabric on top and lay them directly on top of it themselves. We are not going to stagger them. For larger sales it's important to stagger the patches so there are at least two inches offset. On a patch assembly like that we would sew those patches in place right on top of the original fabric. By staggering the patch like this it helps distribute the stress of larger structural awnings. For the best support at the corner we recommend using dacron in the sandwich patches underneath the original fabric. Since this is a smaller structural awning we're going to just lay all those layers on top of themselves and then sew a single row straight stitches along the outer edge. We don't need to do the inner edges because those will be sewn under when we create our double hem. After that panel has been sewn together and the patches have been sewn on we'll take it to a law floor again to create the hollow along each one of the edges. You may have already created the hollow when you laid out your masking tape on the floor. We haven't done it here so we're actually doing it after we've got the panels also in together. The side of this awning is 22 foot so we're adding a 10 inch hollow at the center section. We're using a baton to create a smooth hollow along this edge. You can also use a PVC pipe if you don't have a baton to create this nice smooth transition and just mark it with a pencil. Remember also to include your 2 1 1 1r inch hem. Once you've done that to all of your legs determining the amount of hollow you want just take it back over and create your double hem. We're using basting tape to baste everything in position prior to sewing. Here's that corner patch assembly with the hymns folded over it to make it look beautiful. This corner patch assembly is used to help support the grommet or the webbing and rings. Then we take it over the sewing machine and we sew that hem. We're only going to put a straight stitch along the inside of this hem. You can also put another stitch along the outside edge of this hem if you sew shoes. And you would obviously sew around the perimeter of the entire sunshade on him. Here we are sewing the hem over the patch. Now we're done reversing at the beginning end of each stitch. Now this customer wanted super large rings installed in his sunshade awning and he wanted to install those with webbing. So that's what we're doing here. We're just installing the webbing over the ring as you can see here in the video. And then we sew down the length of the webbing to secure it in place. This is a good idea to do in lieu of putting in a grommet if you do not have a die set. If you do not have a large enough grommet sewing in a ring with webbing is a very good idea. If you do have a die set we really recommend you use a die set to install a good fasting method for your sunshade awning. And we do that on the opposite leg as well. If you're sewing machine box at this you may have to do it with a hand needle and prewax twine. But the ultra-feed will do a pretty good job. This is the Sailrite 1-11. And you can see through reverses at the beginning and the end of each stitch to lock them in place. We'll secure this ring with webbing at all three corners. Here we're just showing one more stitch down the length of webbing. She does three on each leg. And here's what the awning looks like when it's done. When we put this awning up on our real tensioning device instead of using people in a line at each one of the corners because of that hollow it'll hang beautifully. So this will look great on your home or commercial structure. I want to talk about the hollow one more time. Here's another sunshade awning that we constructed. And you can see there's more hollow in this sunshade awning than the other one. Here's a lot of hollow in here but this will make it lay beautifully tight and taunt when we actually use a fasting method. And on this side the white line there is an awning rope that will be put in an awning track along the side of a house. Hopefully this video has given you a few ideas of what you can do for a sunshade awning for your home or commercial building. The sky is the limit. You can see there are all kinds of fasting methods and all kinds of techniques to create a beautiful sunshade awning for your home or your commercial structure. I'm Eric Grant with Sailrite. Thanks for watching.