Zinc roof detail

scottishblondie

We're getting a new zinc roof fitted to an existing extension (low pitched roof, never should have been tiled, blah blah blah).  Anyway, the roof is supposed to have an "eyebrow" detail over the double french doors to mimic one on the original house.  However, the original is formed in lead and our builders are of the opinion that it won't look great in zinc because it will need to be snipped to form the curve and will have a larger overhang.  They've suggested instead that we either going with a straight across roof, or cladding the full front of the eyebrow in zinc down to the same level as the bottom of the fascia to make it a "bigger feature".  We were going to have plastic fascia/soffits, but are now strongly leaning towards having them in zinc as well.

I'm struggling to find any examples of what the eyebrow would look like done in zinc.  There are plenty of example online of lead of copper ones, but not zinc.  Perhaps because zinc isn't a great material for this? As a result we're finding it hard to make a decision on what to do.  

There were formerly 3 "peaks" - one above each window and one above the doors - which is why the area in question is currently triangular rather than rounded.  If anyone can point me to examples of similar zinc roof details or tell me which they reckon would look the best, I'd be very grateful!

grumbler

I don't know the answer to your question, but why do you not want to increase the pitch? How deep is the extension and what pitch is it currently?

scottishblondie

grumbler said:

I don't know the answer to your question, but why do you not want to increase the pitch? How deep is the extension and what pitch is it currently?

The extension is a little over 5m deep and the roof has a pitch of around 8 degrees. We don’t want to increase the pitch as there isn’t space below the first floor windows to increase it significantly. We would need to cut in to the roof around the windows to achieve a pitch suitable for tiles, and that would open a whole can of worms as we only own the ground floor.

FreeBear

I think what you are looking for is "barrel vaulting" - Should be fairly easy to do as zinc is a pretty soft material. Forming the edge would require the use of a swaging roller and soldering a curved section on the front. Might even get away with hand beating a lip round a former if a swaging roller is not available. (I used to do some cladding in aluminium, ad this sort of thing was common stuff).

scottishblondie

Thanks that is useful. I feel like I want to press ahead and have it look like the one above as much as possible, we’re spending so much money on this I just want the best look we can get!