Today we start a stretch of what’s supposed to be no rain. Well, for a couple days, and then not much for some more days.
So I hope to get the roof complete. Over the last couple weeks I bought new aluminum vents and cleaned, scrubbed, and painted the stovepipe covers. Today I pulled off the roof panels, so it looked like this:
Then I got all that old insulation off. The stringers (is that the correct name?) and plywood is surprisingly good. There were dozens of nails sticking up, like this:
The ones that are angled would interfere a little with the insulation. And moving around on the roof is dangerous with those. So I got some diagonal pliers and cut them all, as short as possible.
Only around the rear vent and shower was there significant rot. Very bad rot.
So I pulled that off, and cut out the rotten plywood. I’ll need to patch the hole in the ceiling, but I’ll figure out what to do later. I got the cross stringer replaced, but I ran out of time to do the three smaller pieces. So now it looks like this:
Right in the center is the new stringer and the hole where the vent will go.
I had an interesting observation. Rather than an individual piece of that horrible crepe paper insulation in each bay, there is one stretch from the front to the back. That means it goes between each stringer and the plywood. There’s a solid mass of paper pulp under each stringer. I had previously noticed from the inside that there are a series of discolored lines in the plywood. That’s why. Any water that seeps through the roof will be caught by that awful insulation and some of it sucked into that gap. Where it will almost never evaporate.
I can’t get that out. The next best thing I can do is to calc each seam. More to come.