Category: standing seam

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on location in Titusville, PA

Folks, it’s been a great weekend. Kirk picked me up on Friday. He’s building a garage and using salvaged slate for the roof and the siding. Over the weekend we started work on the roof together. First task was the drip edge. We made some origami corners for the drip and used “my” double lock clip system which give it a real old-world handmade kinda look while also being very easy to install.

We don’t have copper yet so the pan-forming work will have to start next weekend. We are doing a 3′ snow apron in standing seam copper, and the roof will have 4 skylights so there is quite a lot of custom detailing to work on.

The drip corner starts as a miss-shaped copper fortune cookie..

And then it’s nailed onto the corner and shaped in-place with an anvil and planishing hammers.

No need to cut/miter the drip edge and the corner has a strong, one-piece gusset now that you can step on without it crushing.

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Photo of today

This shot does a great job of showing process and finish in the same photo. Every region has unique styles but they all follow the rules of trad roofing: full joinery. I’m a big fan of the transverse seams on the valley intersection.

Why is this superior?

  • There is no lap, anywhere. The entire functioning surface is fully in view. Just like a membrane.
  • If any individual piece is damaged: in can be removed and replaced without disrupting the remaining assembly.
  • All intersections are fully seamed, twice over.
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Photo of today: Traditional Roofing in Virginia

An old roof I captured while in Virgina.

This roof is nearly 100 years old, has fully seamed details and is still functioning perfectly. How many times did their neighbors pay for asphalt re-roofs over the years as this proud roof continued to give a return on initial investment?

This is a wholly transcendent system: I can’t image why any honest roofer who assess their conscious could imagine doing anything other than this: every time.

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Roasting: Coffey Contracting, Pittsburg PA

It is a real shame to see this over and over and over again. There are a lot of American historic roofers who have only ever known flat lock. I will continue to shame them.

Flat lock, was a mistake in the past and it is still a mistake today. Roof tinners in early America developed flat lock, out of necessity and ignorance. They had complex shapes to cover, and they had no guild training so they weren’t aware of free seaming without solder. It was a “good enough” approach.

Why is this bad?

  • It ignores better practices, and older methods with a longer track record.
  • The man-hours and cost to sweat panels together on a pitched surface are exorbitant.
  • The same amount of copper and less man hours could have been applied to a free-seamed assembly with proper joinery. better value.
  • Repairability: That whole thing is one big monolith now. If a repair is needed in 10, 50, 100 years, it will have to be all re-done. If it were a free-seamed god-honoring assembly: you only need to remove the damaged panel, and can stitch a new one in. We have precedents for copper roofing done in the guild style (solder less) from aachen that are 800 years old.
  • Expansion and contraction: This detail will fight against itself, slowly working on the joints until one of them fails.. and again when it does the only recourse is remove it.
  • Field repairs to aged copper with more solder are notoriously feeble.
More ignorance, costing man-hours, and wasting a good resource.
The god-honoring seam plan.
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Meanwhile, in Kiev

Hello everyone. This is my first post on kiânke. I represent the company “the first roof workshop”, the city of kharkiv.

Our team just came back from Kiev, where we participated in the construction service festival. Where we were invited by our partners company “kverb”. for the exhibition, we brought the first in Ukraine a machine-template for the manufacture of salary salaries.

Impressions Sea!!! New dating. Masters from all over Ukraine gathered. And also the cool guys from Belarus. Hello everyone