Making Roof Shingles 22 July, 2008

Transcript

Man 1: This is the art of shingle making. Shingles are wooden tiles for roof coverings. We're using here English oak. Firstly, we start off with the oak round that you can see here, and these are split out with a splitting axe. So what I'll do now is I'll just demonstrate how I split them out with this tool, which is called a froe. I use a copper-hide mallet to split them out. And the important thing is that we use really clean, straight-grained oak.

You can see here, we've pale-colored sap wood and the darker brown heartwood. This is the material we use for the shingle, because this is very durable and it will last up to 70or 80 years untreated, and that's down to the fact it's full of tannic acid, full of tannin, and it's naturally very durable.

I'm now going to remove that. So now I'm going to put this into the cleaving break, and I'll hopefully get three or four shingles out of that. I just start in the middle of the piece of wood.

And you can see I've started to split. And using the break and the froe, I can to a degree determine the way the way the split runs, hopefully down the middle. And I do that by applying pressure to either side.

You can see it's running out to your left. So if I put pressure on the fatter side, I can correct that direction of that split. You see the split coming back in towards me. Too much. I'll put pressure on the other side.

And you can see that's been split in half. Now I should be able to get two out of each piece. Same process again. And it produces this lovely sound, the cleaving sound. Hear the fibers parting? And there you go; that's about the right size.

Man 2: OK, this is the next stage. When you've got the shingle like that you want to dress it and put a taper on it. But first you've got to decide which way it's cut. Because if you look at that, it's doing that slightly. You want that to be the bottom, because as the sunlight hits it, it's going to dry the top quicker and cause it to cup up, which helps it to straighten out there. So that's the bottom. You use your dry knife just to flatten it out.

[sound of woodworking]

Man 2: When the bottom of it is quite flat, you turn it over and decide which end is the thicker end. You want the thickest end to be the bottom. That's slightly thicker there, so that's the bottom. Then you dress the top two-thirds of it, so that the next course will sit on top of it and not stick up. And then you're left with about an eighth of an inch there thickness, and that bit's left cleft so it lasts longer. Then the final process is just to put an edge on it to allow the drips to run off.

Man 3: Hello there. I'm here to do the final process, and my job is just dressing the sides down nice and neatly so they fit together on the roof. We won't get it perfectly done at this point, we'll just get it as nice as we can. When we get them on the roof, we'll have a little special shingling hammer, so when we hammer them in, we've got another little axe on the back to do them much more accurately, so they fit really close together.

But basically, I'll just work my way up. Looking down the line of it, I'll be looking down like that and just getting it as straight as I can get it.

[sound of woodworking]

Man 3: This one's pretty straight already, so it doesn't need too much work doing at all. The other thing you've got to look out for is trying to keep it - as well as being straight, they've got to be parallel. And I think that's pretty much this one finished. We also do build the frames that shingles go on, medieval oak frames. We try and build these all from local wood, doing it as traditionally as we can. And we also do other jobs mentioned on this little poster here, of heads laying, hurdle making, and variety of different coppicing crafts, which we try and source all ourselves.

We have a few little coppices we cut on a steady even-year cycles. I got into coppicing through a place called the Greenwood Centre, and I and the chap who was on camera a moment ago are apprentices through Bill Hogarth and the Royal Trust and the Greenwood Centre, combined scheme.

Man 1: OK, the fixing of the shingles, what we do, we can just about see here the roofing battens. You start; the shingle is fixed here with a stainless annular ring shank now. And the reason we use stainless steel is the reaction with the tannic acid in there now. If we used just steel now, they'd rust. The shingles of cleft oak last about 80 years, 75-80 years they say. Bosham Church down and Chichester Harbour, that was re-shingled in about - I think it was 1903, the beginning of the 20th century. And they had to be had to be replaced in 1978. So that's a good 75 years.

And for that church, Bosham, they used 28, 000 cleft oak shingles, and they were all on average four inches wide and 12 inches long. They used 28, 000 of them. That's quite a few oak butts.

Now we said earlier we were using 15-inch lengths. On average, we get 40-50 shingles out of a round. So you can do your arithmetic and figure out how many rounds you need to cover Bosham Church. Quite a few.

I reckon about 50-60 oak butts. Oak shingles we charge 70 pound a square meter. I think that's quite a good value for money seeing as they last 70-80 years.