Mooroolbark Salvation Army Corps

The Salvation Army Church community in Mooroolbark (VIC) built a new Church, function and welfare centre in 2013. The church seats 250 people and 120 in their function room, which comes with a commercial kitchen, café, crèche, youth centre and interview rooms.

The large room needed a sense of detail and grandeur, which the beams provide. The oil coating is Cutek Sela Brown, also pre-applied in our workshop, creating a “set and forget” rich dark finish to the project.

Vicbeam was approached by Dura Constructions to assist with the manufacture and fabrication of the architectural bolted trusses for the main meeting room. These 16-meter long White Cypress glulam bolted trusses are about as intricate as it gets.

Firstly, the trusses are configured in reverse. Unlike usual trusses where the top chords and post are positioned vertically to form the roof pitch these are hung upside down for visual affect. The result is much more about the aesthetic than structural integrity, an architecturally striking feature of the room.

To create the construction onsite would be impossible, so this was a precision laden process in our workshop, to ensure that when the trusses arrived they were absolutely fit for purpose in terms of size and fixings.

Different from usual trusses these were constructed with double chords, top and bottom, to enhance the aesthetics of the room. The countersunk bolts with stainless steel acorn nuts are a nice finishing touch.