Size of Roofing Nail???

[Buck Hartley, CMI]

Carl,

It is a piece of wire on the size of the nail.

[Carl A. Brown]

The wire is what holds the nails together in the coils for the air nailer.

[jkogel]

Just for the record, the length of the nails was probably not an issue....they're still there, while the shingles tore loose around the nailheads.
Sometimes the nails are fired in on an angle, tearing the asphalt. If not, then they went in too deep and/or the glue strips failed as pointed out above.

John Kogel
www.allsafehome.ca

[David P. Valley]

Originally Posted by bhartley

Would you say this roof was nailed correctly?

Is this home in a high wind area? If so...they should have applied a hand-tabbing of tar adhesive to the underside of these shingles and better nailing than commonly practiced would have helped. Too late now....

[dhelm]

For my own purposes, I always require high wind nailing (6 nails per shingle as opposed to 4) and all nailing is to be done by hand. I would never hire a roofer who uses gun nails on a roof; and the length, at least locally for a new roof (single layer) is 1 1/4 inches.

[pdickerson]

The nails are still visible in the photo. They did not pull out from inadequate pentration. Maybe they were over-driven and compromised the integrity of the shingles, or maybe the winds that caused the damage exceeded the wind speed rating of the shingles.

[ckratzer]

Regardless of what nailing implement was used the, shingles were nailed too high which on arcihtectural type shingles causes a hinge effect once high winds are introduced.
If anyone gets a chance to look at a loose shingle of that type just look at the back of it and you will see why nailing too high is a great big no no.It easily will fold lengthwise at its lamination point. Nails must go through both layers of an architectural shingle.
You can see that was not the case as there are nails above the tops of the preceeding shingle.Those nails should have been at least an inch below if the next layer was nailed properly.

[Darren Spencer]

Originally Posted by dhelm

For my own purposes, I always require high wind nailing (6 nails per shingle as opposed to 4) and all nailing is to be done by hand. I would never hire a roofer who uses gun nails on a roof; and the length, at least locally for a new roof (single layer) is 1 1/4 inches.

I did some jobs in Florida and we did an 8 nail pattern, I wasn't going to have any call backs.....Hate to be the guy when it's time for tear off!

[Kenton H. Shepard, CMI]

Those shingles are short-nailed and high-nailed. Nails should be through the portion where the laminations overlap near the centerline of the shingle.