At the ProTradeCraft LIVE demonstration Zone, we demonstrate how to bend kickout slashing and W-type valley flashing on a Tapco brake.
Use a Tapco brake to bend custom roof flashings on-site
The kickout flashing is the easiest of the flashings to make, and it's the most missed. Flashing leads to the most damage, and it's like 20 cents. I mean, you're going to make one for us here in a couple of seconds, right? And you literally make it out of your scrap, yeah? Or if you're whoever you get your roofing from, they can give you step flashing. You can make it out of a piece of step flashing, whatever. Spend a lot of money on a fancy welded version, and then you see some folks make these, and then they bring out their snips, and they cut the metal, and then they go back in with a bunch of silicone and goop, and they try to make that work, and it's not going to last, right? So this is the bomber foolproof way.
H2: Bend kickout flashing with needlenose pliers and a hammer
Yeah, we should have a drum roll this. So this is a fancy tool for standing seam metal, but you don't need this. A pair of needle-nose pliers, a pair of hand seamers, anything along that way, but you just fold the metal. And I'll clean this up here in just a second. You can put it back in your Tapco brake. If you don't have a brake, you can do it on a job site. And that is literally it. That is your kickout flashing.
W-Type Valley Flashing diverts water into the roof valley
Speaking of sexy flashings, are we going to... We're going to talk about the W now, is that where we're at? We're going to talk about the W. But I've also got another valley here that I don't know if many people have seen. I'm going to bend the... I'm going to bend the W, okay? And Kelsey's going to install the fin valley. So this what you're holding up there, this is our W value, yeah, that's a W.
We were talking about this, like what's the purpose of the W? Does it signify something? Why not just have a... like it's a valley, so V for valley, right? Why the... Why, you... Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to tell them? No, I think you know. You're... This is your jam. I'm... I'm just the... I'm just the interruption. You're the interruption. I up for you. I just teed that up for you. You just complimented yourself. Anyways, the W, I'm going to finish bending this.
So if you have a roof much similar to what you see here and you have a big high sloping roof that comes down onto a little dormer, as water's coming down, if you don't have this W, it'll just sweep right up over water. Water likes to stick to itself. If it can't stick to something else and it loves to stick to things. So surface tension, it will curl around on itself. You give enough force behind it, wind, gravity, whatever the case may be, and it will roll right up under your other roofing.
If you interrupt it, you see what we did there? The interruption. If you interrupt it, it slows down that flow. It helps break that surface tension, and it gives it the option to flow down, out, and away. Perfect. Perfect. We're getting better and better at this. We are getting better and better at this. So this is the W flashing. But you mentioned there's another type of valley flashing that achieves the same purpose but is slightly different.
So this one is quite common. You'll see on exposed fasteners, sometimes standing seam, asphalt roofs. So, open valley asphalt. If you actually check with your asphalt manufacturer, quite often, they actually recommend an open steel valley or open copper valley. So you might want to check into that. There are a few places where they actually will not warranty a roof without a steel flashing. So that's that one that Kel's installed already; basically, the W has been squeezed together to create a fin and very tight like this. You're going to see that as a requirement with a lot more synthetic roofs.
Like the good people at Westlake Royal, they have a Da Vinci system and it requires that type of flashing in the valley. It works very well because water literally has to jump a dam, and it also gives you the ability to create a very clean, sleek line, modern line, a very modern line that, that call it a shadow line the other day where it is and it's just crisp and runs all the way up that valley and for some people, they don't like the look of the metal. They don't want to see it, right? It's not like if you're doing slate and you've got beautiful copper and whatnot in this particular system where the roofing itself is a synthetic slate and they don't want to see the metals. This is an opportunity for you to hide your metal flashes but still have the same functionality, absolutely.
