One thing the roofer omitted doing on my metal roof was to join the sections
of ridge cap properly. The ridge cap is vitally important because it
straddles the necessarily open area where the top ends of the panels are
anchored, and in conjunction with the Z-closure insert pieces alongside
keeps water from getting up into that area even if blown sideways.
The cap has fairly generous dimensions to either side of the ridge
to make sure it can sit over all that stuff, but it isn't as long
as the entire ridgeline and therefore must go on in sections with
as many joints as necessary along the way. The joints, obviously,
also need to be reliably watertight under all possible conditions.
In reviewing some of the instructions for one or another standing-seam roofing system I came across a section about ridge caps, where a couple of alternatives on joining sections were presented. One suggested an overlap of at least six inches, and another endorsed use of additional ridge cap SPLICES which hadn't even occurred to me before but I immediately understood what they'd look like. In remembering what I'd seen up on my roof, I knew that my roofer had definitely done those joints wrong. |
So I needed to make some splice pieces, which would basically be slightly
oversize copies of the ridge cap to pop over the joints and extend out
along the ridge some generous distance beyond. But from what material?
I had plenty of crappy sheet aluminum kicking around, all of either some
different color or bare metal, and wondered if there was any way to make
this look Not Ugly. I didn't have enough cutoffs of the original panels
left to cut anything sufficient from. Nothing even vaguely resembling
cap splice pieces had come with our original kit when the roofing was
shipped, so I called up the supplier to ask if they had any such thing
or what my options might be.
Since I pretty much expected to be fabbing the required pieces, they referred me to their metal shop and a guy there poked around and discovered that they actually had a piece of the same Silversmith metal, just plain sheet, in a 1 foot by 10 foot roll. That would nicely make three or four of the requisite pieces so I offered to take the whole chunk off their hands if that was best for them. Then I'd also have some material left for any other little fixups needed later. They came up with a price and we agreed that they'd pop it onto a truck for their outlet closest to me for me to pick up, and there was no hurry on any of it. Another couple of weeks went by and nobody called, so I poked the metal shop again and it turned out they'd never sent the piece up. They then did so, and somehow in the process they'd also decided to just give it to me gratis instead of accepting the originally agreed on token $15 or whatever it was. They didn't have to do that, I said, I was happy to pay for the piece but apparently I was doing them sort of a favor by taking what was essentially scrap off their hands so I went with it. In thinking about how the caps should work I decided that a simple bend of metal over the junction wasn't quite good enough as wind-driven water could still migrate underneath. No, remembering the miserable hell and sketchy patch job that the Grace under there had gone through I wanted some actual sealant material involved, to divert *any* errant water away from the ridgeline area. I thought that not only could the original joint itself get sealed up better, judiciously located strips of closed-cell foam might be just the thing to stop water before it got that far in. But that would need a little room underneath and I wanted the splice edges to be pretty tight. Bottom line, the splice would want to hump up ever so slightly in the middle over the original joint, fitting closely to the original ridge cap at its outer edges but leaving room a little ways in for the foam strip. I modeled this up with a bit of cardboard and determined the extra shaping it would need. |
A delayed ending
I had also never been quite happy with how the roofer interfaced the two small cap pieces at the ends of the ridge over the dormer split, leaving me with a sort of redneck pseudo-flash that I wasn't convinced would really reliably shed water in the right directions. He had tried to re-bend things a little better during his final visit, but it was still fairly open and wind-driven sideways rain would likely find its way in under the main cap regardless. I wanted to get some kind of cover over that joint too, just enough to get water at the very top headed the right way, but the slopes and shapes of the existing relevant parts meant that adding an extra cap here wouldn't really do the trick. |
I didn't do anything about this until a year after the center-section caps,
but one beautiful May morning it suddenly struck me that there might be
an easy quick-n-dirty fix for the ends. I still had a small roll of
Wigluv left, which would be wide enough to bridge across those
sketchy not-really-flashed joints.
I re-checked some references, confirming that the tape is "UV stable",
and decided that even if it wouldn't last as long as a piece of
metal it was worth getting *something* onto those joints to keep
horizontal rain out.
To make the proposed hack-job a little less visible I cut the strips and then gave them a quick shot of silver spray paint and let them dry before installing, which also allowed making sure that the paint solvent wouldn't simply destroy the tape substrate. It seemed to hold up okay, and the skin of paint even stayed fairly flexible. Perhaps this would even afford a little better UV protection. |