The Roof is Maybe Fixed

At the recent workhike to the Julian Harrison Hut, we fixed the roof. Maybe. Quintus already wrote a great report about the trip, so I’m going to restrict myself to

What Work We Did, and
Sharing Mediocre Photos (and Some Good Ones)

because that is way cooler than posting them on Instagram. Maybe.

(You can click on the photos to view them full screen, which is much better.)

What Work We Did

The main goal of the workhike was to fix the hut’s roof which (supposedly) leaked. Sure enough, when we got there, we could see lots of water damage on the inside of the tongue-and-groove, though no actual water.

After inspecting the hut, we came up with a theory for how the water was getting in. The roof is covered by two metal plates, one on the top half and one on the bottom half. Between the two plates were a bunch of gaps where the metal has warped over time. We think that wind has been blowing water and snow up and into these gaps. This hypothesis is consistent with our leak beta: that leaking happens evenly along the inside walls of the hut and that it’s worst when it’s windy.

We sealed the gaps by stuffing them full of butyl tape and driving in roofing screws to close them. In some places, we ended up with three times the density of roofing screws that were there before. Hopefully this prevents gaps from opening up again in the future.

We used up our entire thirty-foot roll of butyl tape. Actually, it would have been nice to have more.

Along the apex of the hut there was a roof cap of two long pieces that were joined together with caulking. Though it didn’t look that bad, the caulking might not have been perfectly intact, so we slathered it with liquid rubber sealant. The rubber sealant is ugly but hopefully it forms a good seal.

We had also heard that some roofing screws had broken seals that might be leaking. We carefully inspected all of the roofing screws on the hut. Most were fine. We tightened some of them a little. If we found any screws with broken seals, we took them out, used our syringe to inject rubber sealant into the holes, and drove in new screws.

We found four roofing screws on the hut that were obviously different from all the others and were in much worse condition. They were very loose, rusty, and (as we could see when we took them out) wickedly bent. Clearly some water was leaking in where those screws were because, after we replaced them, some of our rubber sealant dripped through the roof and onto someone’s sleeping bag. Those screws can’t have been responsible for all of the leaking, however, because they were only at the front right of the hut, whereas the leaking was everywhere.

We’re not sure why these four were in such bad shape, or why there were four oddball screws on this one part of the hut. Were they installed long after all the other screws? Were they never tightened enough? Were they just bad screws? We don’t know. What we do know is that they’re now out of the roof and nicely replaced.

We had heard that the hut might be missing tab closures under the roofcap. This turned out not to be the case. Not only could we see tab closures under the roofcap, but they looked like they were forming a good seal. We nevertheless added a little liquid rubber sealant anywhere that we saw a larger gap.

Anton Afanassiev had procured some nice new latches to put on the outhouse. I forgot them in the car. We therefore improvised a latch with some string. Hopefully a future workhike can install something more durable. Only the latch on the outside of the door needs to be replaced; the inside latch is fine. Note that the metal groove will make installing a latch difficult. You might need to mount some small pieces of wood and attach the latch to those so that it clears the groove.

The bottom hinge on the outhouse door was bent, so we took it off. A future workhike should put on a new hinge. (The hinges other than the bottom one were fine.)

We left the hut with a new first aid kit that was assembled by Sri Chaitanya. Don’t take this as encouragement to huck cliffs into trees.

I forgot the latest VOC journal in the car, so it didn’t make it to the hut. I forgot to get the code to open the cash box, so we didn’t empty it. Anyway I doubt that an overfull cashbox was the cause of the leak.

Sharing Mediocre Photos (and Some Good Ones)

The good ones are those not taken by me.