Kev on TV last night.

[The Other Mike]

Why don't they dump a load of sodium hydroxide down there and make some soap to clean the rest of the drain?

[Bert Coules]

I've just caught up with this, recorded on Sky Plus in HD. Bizarrely, the show seems to have been broadcast with the audio description track for the visually impaired permanently switched on: did else experience this, or should I be looking for an obscure fault in my equipment?

His initial "no power tools" approach didn't last very long, did it?

[tim.....]

Bump.

Is there no-one who knows this?

tim

[GMM]

Would be if it was a sewer pleb (!)

[Jules Richardson]

Asphalt shingles? Over here, they're normally capped with an overlapping row of cut-down shingles, with one nail either side of the ridge securing each one. Sounds a bit bodgy (like most US construction ;-) but seems to work in practice.

Our elderly barn does have some form of metal capping to it, though - possibly just because it's about 50ft to the ridge and so it gets really hammered by the weather.

cheers

Jules

[Huge]

No, wooden shakes.

[tim.....]

Oh silly me, I thought that the word shingle mean wooden tile, rather than referring to some other part of the process :-(.

Though according to this,

'm sort of half right, but I digress.

Surely the reason for overlapping rows by half a tile horizontally whilst offsetting them vertically from the one below is done so that any water that drips though the cracks in one row falls onto the middle of a tile underneath it and runs away.

But for the topmost row the gaps aren't going to have anything underneath to catch the water, so either the water is going to drip into the house or if there is felt underneath to stop this happening, get trapped on the felt by the top edge of the second row down, and sit there forever rotting the top two rows of tiles.

Unless there is a ridge tile to stop this, which Kev didn't have. (Unless he put them on it whilst we weren't looking and they'll magically be there next week - like it was a cooking for numpties program)

tim

[Jules Richardson]

Ah, fairy nuff. I've got cedar shakes on one of the vehicle sheds, so if I remember later I'll have a nose and see how the ridge is done.

cheers

Jules

[Tim Lamb]

For slates you use half size for the top row but you still need a ridge cap of some sort. I use sheet lead folded round a length of 40mm waste pipe.