While we had this lovely dry weather, we tackled a problem we had with our Gutters in the A-B corner of our house, above our Kitchen window and the Front Door section. We had a steady dribble whenever it rains, underneath the guttering and dripping off the fascia. It does not do this anywhere else so we had to get up there to inspect the rubber liner and interface to the downpipe module.
This involved us having to unscrew the thin oak batten that is clamping down the metal mesh and the edge of the rubber membrane. It was rather difficult because we filled the gap in among the holes in the mesh with silicone sealant and it has stuck itself rather well. After a careful teasing away the rubber material, we could finally bend back the metal mesh to give us access to inside the Gutters.
Here we discovered that the rubber liner has become unstuck off the glass fibre resin surface and therefore, allowed water to sneak backwards underneath the liner and eventually found a joint from one piece of oak to another, and dribbled out.
So, it is a case of re-sticking the rubber membrane back down again. but, will it? It is very dirty so we did a lot of cleaning and looked at the old glue on the back of the rubber, got some solvent which seems to be able to soften the old glue and start removing it.
At this point, we decided to pin back as much of the rubber material out of the Gutters, to allow the wood to dry out more thoroughly before we continued with the repair job.
Lifted the rubber in AB Corner Gutter
After a couple of days, while fortunately the rain held off completely, the Oak wood is looking much better now. We prepared the glass fibre surfaces by rubbing it down with sandpaper, some powerful solvent and also cleaned the rubber membrane as well. We then coated both surfaces with a good quality contact glue, where we then waited for those coated surfaces to dry, before we carefully rolled the rubber membrane back flat down along the whole gutter section and getting it nice and flat on the glued area. We then went to find some extra rubber membrane material and cut ourselves a piece measuring 100mm wide and about 300mm long. This went across the front edge of the downpipe channel so that the gushing water coming off the valley of the slates up on the roof, will be deflected away from the open edge of the fibre glass and the front Oak vertical cover.
AB Ruibber glued back down
We put in a little bit of mastic sealant in the edge of the rubber membrane that flattens across to the fibre glass, to make sure no water can creep into and underneath the rubber protector.
We then treated some of the timber with anti-fungal timber treatment solution, by dribbling some of the liquid down between the rubber membrane, to discourage any further fungal growth etc. before we pinned the rubber back down along the front vertical part of the guttering. We squirted a line of black sealant glue on top of the rubber strip, before bending the metal mesh, along with the wooden strip, back down and screw it all back down tight again.
And mesh back in place
Now we need lots of rain to test our work .. phew!