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Monday, January 21, 2013

Martin Luther King's Home and Roof

This is Martin Luther King's day. He stopped a lot of misery in his day and kept a lot away for us today. Occasionally in the history of man comes a man with right on his side and the patience to act on it. In this company I can count Mahatma Gandhi,  Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln. Today is the day we remember MLK. Few people are known by acronyms but if you have one, you are special: JFK, RFK, FDR, LBJ... no one says RMN for Nixon.

So I looked up his home and was startled to see a roof that used to be prevalent: asbestos tiles. These diamond shaped tiles laid flat, were nailed at the top and had an upside down brass hook in the face to keep them from blowing off. The asbestos was encapsulated in Portland cement, making it a transite asbestos containing roofing material, ACRM or just ACM. This makes the asbestos fibers tightly packed, which is hard to make friable. If you rough it up, cut it or crush it, the asbestos fibers become airborne. This is when the attorneys and doctors step in.

Left alone and free of algae the asbestos shingle would last a very long time.



When the asbestos was mixed with cement and a few other products it could be made into about any shape you wanted. See the ridge in the picture?

When I was in college I was tearing off one of these roofs after a hailstorm. I filled up a wheel barrow, turned it to go uphill, stepped back into a few of these plates lying on top of one another. boy was I glad there was a tree at the eave that i was crushed against by the runaway wheel barrow.
There is some beautiful workmanship in the clapboard siding ornamental railing and posts but the wood shingle stagger pattern is just great.

 Mastic Siding makes some vinyl products that look a lot like these and will last a very long time. But none of these products will last as long as MLK's ideas and dreams. 
I was going to see if my neighbors set out their trash and a number of them did, including the black folks across the street. I guessed the city might gather trash today but out of respect I didn't set it out. I admit that I was late in getting on the bandwagon for this great man but once on I am here forever. Without him I might lose some very good friends and employees.





Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
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