Zinc

It seems to have been a busy couple of days. Pete and Mike are making good progress on the lower roof, and have begun to cut through to make skylights.

Then the Irish team - Andy and Jason - arrived to start the zinc roof. The zinc is in very heavy rolls, and is laid out on long workbenches, and cut by hand. Spot the tinsnips

Because of the curve on the roof, the sections that will eventually cover the whole roof are slightly wedge-shaped. So they measure and cut these by hand, and then also have to fold the edges by hand, with rollers that fold up a precise amount of the zinc to form a vertical seam - these will link the panels together. When I got home from work, they were finishing the last one of the day in almost pitch darkness!

Then they started to work on the gutter - again curved, and so made of short sectiions carefully soldered together.

Meanwhile Ben returned for another long but useful site visit, fueled by rock buns.

Today, Andy was still busy on the gutters which were already filling up with autumn leaves.

Yesterday, Pete, Mike, Ben and I had had a lot of trouble trying to work out the fall on the gutter, which seems to be following the convex curve of the roof. Everyone had agreed that the downpipes needed to be at each end. But by the morning, there was enough rain in the gutter to convince me that my overnight conclusion that the gutter must be horizontal, despite appearances, was right. So unfortunately, Andy had to seal over the two holes at the ends of the guttter, and cut in the downpipes back in the originally planned positions!
In the middle of all this activity, the vent pipes for the toilets were put in place, so that the zinc can be sealed around them. And Andy and Jason started to work on the trim that forms a neat edge to the roof, at the front, and folds over into the top of the gutter at the back.