Friday, December 10, 2004

Two Drops Forward, One Drop Back

The roof is more than 3/4 complete, but it leaks in four places. One is the vent flashing. This should be fixed by installing a new one.


The second one is in the skylight that has been flashed, but the roofing above it has not been installed. Thus all the water from 66 square feet of roof runs right under the flashing. Still, it didn’t leak when it had only "paper" flashing. This should be fixed when the additional roof pieces go on.

Third is in the living room above where the aforementioned roofing is to be installed. Should likewise be fixed. Still, it’s incredible that the roof is leaking at all.

Fourth, and the most disturbing one, is in the living room in an already roofed section. This area has never leaked before. The only source for water has to be the very upper edge of the roof that won’t get capped until the whole thing is on. Let’s hope so. I don’t really want to contemplate the alternatives.

The roof is made up of only 8 giant, 10" thick panels. The seams have been glued, and foamed. Then they were foamed again, once in place, and self-adhesive flashing was laid over all the seams (only 4 seams). Atop all this is a 5/8" layer of plywood that is offset to every seam, and is glued and screwed in place. Over all of this is a layer of Tri-Flex 30 roofing "paper". A tough, hurricane rated, polyethyline roofing material. The curbs for the skylights is equally impressivelly flashed. Still...

Never underestimate the persistence of water.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Schedule 40

I loathe days like today. I spent it driving a hundred miles to make 3 stops. Worse than this, I was under a tight deadline to get to my last stop before they closed at 4:30pm. This was necessitated for wont of a vent pipe. The two feet of 4" vent pipe that will stick up above the roof. Often this is left as the 4" of black ABS, painted or covered by some metal roof jack. In my case this was to be, like everything else, stainless steel.

The Zs had volunteered to come up with a piece through their contacts, but suddenly on Wednesday they realized that they were about to cover that area of the roof, and they had no solution. I was in Astoria all day Thursday, and they agreed to solve the problem that day. When I returned home, I swung into the new driveway in the darkness and directed my headlights onto the roof. Little or no progress and no vent tube.

Thus I found myself this morning having to come up with a piece of pipe. Being Friday it was important to get something that day in case our spate of rain-free weather continued. The gods were dangling the good weather in front of us, and we were blowing it. In these past 3 days the roof could have been virtually finished.

I turned to Northwest Metal Products again. They were as responsive as usual, but if we were going to do something with what was on hand, I would have use "schedule 40" stainless steel pipe. I have seen and used the term often, but like so many things in life that we are familiar with, in truth we have no clue what they mean. In this case schedule 40 is the common minimum standard for DWV pipe, for example.

What I had originally wanted was a very thin piece of tubing as a mere cosmetic cover to the pipe or even to couple to the system via what is called a "hubless" coupler. In either case I had in mind something maybe 1/32 of an inch thick. I learned that pipe is really only specified by its outer dimension. I then made the wrongheaded logical jump to conclude in my own mind that surely schedule 40 4" stainless steel pipe would naturally be much thinner than 4" plastic pipe. This notion is further obscured to the novice because schedule 40 pipe is routinely referred to as "thin wall" pipe in the industry even though ABS DWV pipe is 1/8" thick.

In any case, although a c-note to acquire, I ordered it under a bit of duress, and then fled my house to make my own schedule

Boy was I surprised when North West presented me with a nicely polished hunk of tubing weighing in at a good 20 pounds. Remember, it is only 2 feet long. Turns out that schedule 40 is exactly that, a schedule. It's not a formula or a chart, but a schedule where one must look up the material, and nominal diameter and with this determine what schedule pipe to choose to meet one's other requirements. Turns out I really wanted was schedule 10S or even 5S stainless tubing.

One end of my vent pipe is precisely cut at 30 degrees to match the slope of the roof, and northwest had polished it up quite nicely. It is really too beautiful to mount on the roof, and I'm considering keeping it in the living room as a monument to how even the best intentioned modest projects can turn to folly and excess.








Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Metallica (Photos)

The stainless steel roof is starting to take shape. Today was the first of a few forecast clear days. The Zs got their first skylight sealed up and it is a thing of beauty. Thanks to the custom made stainless "saddle" I had made and some different side flashing there are up to 4 layers of water proofing with no silicon or caulking of any kind. This is waterproofing the old fashioned way, that is not trying to block water with high-tech sealents, but giving the water an easier path to ground. About 1/3 of the roof is complete, but it was too late to take pictures of it so here are some from earlier in the day. Click on the thumbs for larger images.




Workers in the mist



Working from the inside out


This doesn't work when it's raining


Doesn't look different from the south



In Oregon you can't have enough roofs