Making Copper Tiles for the Ridge Cap

I have always been a big fan of Copper roofs, especially when they patina.  Copper roofs last hundreds of years and just look so much more interesting than asphalt ones.  Problem is that they are just too expensive.  But with my earth sheltered home project, I was going to have very few square ft of roof, so copper suddenly became affordable again.  Making the tiles myself would also significantly reduce the cost. For this first part, I was really just wanting to put a copper cap on the front and back ridge of the garage. This post is about how I did that.  At some other point, I may also make diamond tiles to cover a few hundred feet of regular roof…  But first, this video

The Video

Alternatives

I had put stucco on the front and back of the garage and this ridge cap was to cover the 12-inch ridge along the top of the shotcrete wall…  Looking back, I could have done it a few other ways.  For instance, I could have just wrapped the top of the wall in lath and then just put stucco right up over the ridge.  Another option would have been to put tile up along the ridge.

I had planned to use copper shingles for all the skylight caps also, but now that I am older and wiser, I plan to just cap the second skylight on the garage with copper and switch to using large format tiles (that I can get for about 1$/sqft) on the other 5 skylight curbs.

The tools

The Press Break Roll was pretty fun to use and getting it 40% off from Harbor Freight made it even better.  One of these days I’ll put more details about it under the “tools” section of this website and maybe make a more focused video.  In the meantime, I can put the original crate back on top of it to keep the dust off so it is ready to use next time I am in the mood.

Along with that, I needed a nice mallet for pounding the copper, good aviation snips for cutting it, pliers, etc.  Generally speaking, pretty standard stuff.

The Gallery

Pictures help tell the story, so I put a bunch in the description of each image…  Enjoy.

Here is my new press break roll. It weighs about 300 lbs and I was taking a break after getting it from the back of my truck to the top of the wheel barrow. Next I would need to get it up onto that wheeled cart I made just for this purpose…

Here I am using the Press function of the Harbor Freight Brake-Press-Roll to cut pieces from the copper coil.

The Brake on the Harbor Freight tool worked pretty well. Here I am lining up the second point in my fold line…

This front cap was my first attempt, lessons were learned as mistakes were made along the way, but I still enjoyed it.

Here is one of the tiles from the first section… Mistakes included that I didn’t fold down the top corners of the tabs, so they got in the way as the tiles started needing to curve back down… I also didn’t make the drip edge significant enough…

Here we are coming up the north west side…

The Go Pro caught this shot of me looking tired but satisfied after finishing the copper cap on the front of the garage.

Here is a close up of the last tile on the front. You can see the rivets used to hold it all together (in addition to the folds)

This section of the FoxBlocks leaked a bit and made an ugly lump that would have shown thru the copper. I chiseled it out and refilled with smooth mortar. Here Michael is troweling it off.

The Go Pro also caught this pic. Not sure why we are both looking at the camera. Maybe it was on purpose. 😉

The copper after it was placed over the smoothed ridge…

The Press Break put away after doing a good job.