American Artisan Volume 69, No. 25 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...water-tight and water-proof job be guaranteed. This can be done, no matter what is the pitch or style of the roof, but in the case of other materials the style of roof structure must be adapted to them. Even then, in the matter of hits, valleys, dormers, or skylights, all other material, roofers depend on tin, copper, zinc or other sheet metal flashings to make good their work; hence, the virtue of their roof, after all, depends on its metallic part, and not on the other substitutes for roofing. 2.--A roof must be wind proof. Only in the use of Terne plates can the most perfect fastenings to the wood work be obtained. This fastening can be as thorough as is necessary, or more so, even without driving nails through the covering. The fastenings of a metallic roof are all under the covering itself, and have nothing at all to do with the water-proof requirements. In the case of tar-roofing, the resort to gravel was made for the purpose of holding the paper in place without nails, but gravel has the disadvantage of holding the water and snow, and thereby rots the felting. The writer has taken off scores of gravel roofing and replaced the same with terne. These roofs had only been on a few years, but the terne replacing them has been good now for forty years, and will last a lifetime yet. Both shingle and slate roofs are damaged by wind storms, and in the case of slate, in a storm, it is a very dangerous factor and scores many accidents. The writer, in 1803, removed a slate roof from one of the large churches of this city, and replaced the same with terne. This roof is good for half a century yet, unless injured by accident or an earthquake. FIRE PROOF FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT. 3.--A roof should be fire-proof. Only in the use of metallic roofing can there be any c...