Stone Coated Roof Flashings for Milpitas, CA

A lot of Milpitas went up quickly. Ford opened an assembly plant here in the 1950s, and the tract neighborhoods built in that boom gave the flatlands their plain gable and hip roofs, block after block. The plant is long gone (the Great Mall fills the old building now), yet the houses remain, and plenty of them have been reroofed more than once, usually in composition shingle.

East of the valley floor the streets start to climb. Hillside homes toward Ed R. Levin County Park sit on sloped lots with larger roofs, more hips and valleys, and long views west across the South Bay. Then comes the newest layer of town: rows of townhomes and condos around the Great Mall and the Milpitas BART station, usually under a homeowner association with its own rules for how the outside of each building should look.

On a flat lot you see your own roof from the sidewalk, at a low angle, and a plumbing vent on the back slope can hide behind the ridge. Build the same house into a hill and the angle flips. The neighbor uphill sees your entire field of shingles from the kitchen window. You see it too, every time you walk down a driveway that sits above the house.

From up there a new galvanized pipe jack is the brightest thing on the roof. It catches the afternoon sun and flashes like a nail head in a gray or brown field. The old habit is to hit it with a spray can on the last day of the job. That buys one decent season. After that the paint chalks, the color drifts away from the shingle, and whatever overspray landed on the granules around the cone stays put for the life of the roof.

Stone coating was made to end that routine. A stone coated jack comes off the roofer's truck already wearing a finish that reads like the shingle around it, so nobody paints anything on the roof and nobody comes back to repaint it. Our literature calls the result maintenance free, with no UV deterioration or rust ever again, which is what you want on a slope that faces west into the late sun.

Our product lines cover the metal that typically comes through a house roof. Our stone coated flashings start with the plumber jack, the part we are best known for, and run through assemblies, valley metal, O'Hagins, nosing, roof to wall, saddles, skylights, steep flashings and specialty pieces. On plumbing flashings the trouble spot is the seam on the cone, which is where so many of them leak. We seal that seam with an adhesive that bonds with the metal, so the joint a spray can never closed is closed before the part leaves us.

Our stone coated vents include low profile O'Hagin vents, dormer vents, elbow vents, vent caps, heat pipes and double wall vent pipe. On the bigger hillside roofs, with more attic below and more vents in plain view from the street above, those parts carry as much of the look as the shingle does.

Then there is the Rapid Sleeve, a 10 inch metal pipe sleeve with an elongated drip cap and a lower flare, built to seal a plumber vent without a rubber collar or a drop of spray paint. Every one of these parts can be coated to the shingle color on your job.

When a Milpitas association reroofs a building, the board is buying one thing above all: a roof that looks the same from one end of the complex to the other and keeps looking that way. Painted pipes work against that goal. A few years after the job, some jacks have faded, a couple were touched up in a slightly different shade, and one on the back side never got painted at all.

Stone coated parts start in the shingle color and stay in it. Our brochures promise we can match any color, with custom color blending for the in between shades, so the roofer hands us the shingle color and every flashing and vent on the building can arrive in it. For the roofer on an association job, the parts suit all standard types of installations, need no special tools, and carry a limited 25 year product warranty. Board members who want to see the difference before a vote can start with our homeowners page and the reasons to stone coat, and neighboring associations in Fremont and Santa Clara can do the same.