Wooden shingles have been used for many centuries as a roofing covering for Russian villages and cities – it was the most affordable material that provided reliable hydro and thermal insulation of houses. In the wake of the fashion for environmentally friendly materials, shingle roofs began to be erected again already in modern conditions.
Shingles are called roofing in different ways: shingles, plowshares, tes, gorodets. Regardless of the name, the essence remains the same – wooden planks laid on the roof in two or three layers.
A well-laid and processed shingle roof can regularly serve for more than a hundred years, without changing its properties. There are almost no craftsmen who can lay wood shingles in Russia, so many have to re-learn and adopt experience from abroad, in countries where the skill is not forgotten, and the climate is close to ours.
For example, a shingle is made in Germany, its factory production has been established for a long time, and the finished product is inherently a roofing shingle – a wooden tile.
A shingle roof, in addition to its environmental properties, also has technical advantages, when laid between the elements, small gaps are formed, which, when the tree swells during rain, closes, and in sunny weather, the covering shrinks, providing itself a self-ventilation process.
Roofing shingles are divided into two types, depending on the manufacturing method: sawn and chipped. Only moisture-resistant wood, ultra-strong and resinous, is selected as raw material. Larch, oak, linden, aspen or Canadian red cedar wood is used.
Shingles can be of various shades, it depends on the type of wood from which it was made, for example, cedar shingles have a purple-red hue, larch is light beige. But the original color of the finished roof made of wooden shingles does not last for a long time, in the process of exposure to weather changes, the coating will turn gray.
The shingle is installed in a double or triple way, depending on the constant number of planks in diameter. The triple layer is considered more reliable. Relatively low weight of the roof, fifteen to seventeen kilograms per square meter, there is no need to build a powerful rafter system.
In this case, a ventilation space must be organized to remove moisture, and the material itself must be treated with antiseptic impregnations and anti-fire agents.
