Whether your tastes run toward Jack-in-the-Box or Outback Steakhouse, the odds are getting better that you'll be dining under a metal roof.

Architects and builders are increasingly using metal roofing in commercial and institutional buildings, and some inroads are even being made on the residential front, according to representatives from Berridge Manufacturing Co., San Antonio, Texas.

Speaking at a recent continuing education seminar held in Cleveland and sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, Berridge Manufacturing corporate architect Ian Gordon and regional sales representative Jim Biezki noted that metal roofing's market share has climbed considerably in the past 10 years.

Galvanized steel and aluminum roofs have always had a presence in the warehouse and industrial building sector, but low maintenance and long wear life advantages are combining with an increasingly broad color selection to give the material greater appeal in applications for restaurants, shopping centers, schools and churches.

Berridge Manufacturing uses galvanized steel coils (and to a lesser extent, galvanized aluminum) to make roofing panels and shapes to meet architectural specifications. The company offers more than 30 colors and several textures from which architects can choose, and has also designed custom colors for multiple-location customers such as Burger King and Loews.
According to Gordon, just 10 years ago metal roofing's overall market share across all building segments was determined to be 10 percent. But a survey conducted last year showed that architects are now specifying metal roofing for some 40 percent of the buildings they design in the commercial and industrial sectors.

While metal roofing can cost a little more upfront compared to asphalt shingles and some other types of roofing, building owners and contractors are seeing a payoff in the form of lower maintenance costs (no flashing; no sumps to move standing water as with flat roofs) and longer life.

In addition to selling materials, Berridge also sells cutting systems used by contractors such as Tom Geist of The Geist Co., Cleveland.

The Geist Co.'s Paul Gorman gave a demonstration showing a Berridge system at work cutting panels to the length and curvature required.

Geist says the procedure typically generates very little scrap at the work site, as it is designed to use coils in the exact width needed.

He said that the recyclability of the roofing material is not necessarily what customers ask about when they choose metal roofing, but indicated that some customers have begun to make such inquiries, especially when trying to work within a "green building" framework.

Geist acknowledged that the waiting scrap market offers a much better sustainability outcome for a metal roof compared to a load of tear-off shingles or EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) rubber roofing, which is more likely to head for a landfill.

Home builder Gary Mevis doesnt have much trouble selling metal roofs to buyers of the high-end custom homes he nestles under the towering Ponderosa pine trees in Prescott, Ariz.

His sales pitch involves this likely scenario: "Say you're away from your home and in comes a strong wind, which we get here, and one of those heavy limbs breaks off and falls on your roof and you have an asphalt shingle roof. That limb can go completely through that shingle and the roof decking, and now you've got a hole in your roof, and you may not know it for a couple of weeks because you're away."

The same limb could crash onto a 28-gauge steel roof, he says, and "it may make a dent. But it's a dent you won't even notice."

Metal roofing, a traditional favorite for rural outbuildings and commercial structures, has a new and growing following among custom builders and urban remodelers--and their customers.

Since 2000, sales of residential metal roofs have doubled along with market share for the product, thanks in part to a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz by the five-year-old Metal Roofing Alliance, a coalition of companies that make the roofing or supply materials to its manufacturers.

The Belfair, Wash.-based alliance aims to debunk the widespread consumer perception that metal roofing is best suited for barns, where the plink-plink of raindrops on the roof won't disturb occupants and the one-style-fits-all silver sheets won't present an eyesore in a neighborhood of homes topped with earth-tone asphalt.

The message seems to be sinking in, as roofers, remodelers, custom builders, and small production builders are crowning houses from California to the East Coast with roofs made of aluminum, steel, tin, and copper

The new appeal is largely aesthetic: Today's metal roofs can be painted almost any color and can be patterned to mimic the look of cement tiles, wood shakes, and even asphalt shingles. Even subdivisions that once outlawed metal roofs are softening to the look-alike styles. Notes Tom Black, executive director of the Metal Roofing Alliance: "A lot of times, if you have a wood shake-look metal and you're standing at the curb, you'd be hard-pressed to tell it's metal at all."

MORE THAN GOOD LOOKS

But looks alone haven't earned metal 8 percent of the residential roofing market. Roof-ravaging wind, hail, and snow have won metal some converts among homeowners paying for replacement roofs after hurricanes and storms.

Indeed, a S0-year warranty is a huge selling point for the manufacturers of most metal roofs, including some that have earned a Class 4 hail-resistance rating and are guaranteed to withstand 120-mph winds.

Metal's staying power during Florida's foursome of hurricanes last summer "created a monster for us," brags Brad Davis, owner of West Coast Metal Roofing & Construction in Milton, Fla., whose sales have increased by 380 percent since August.

Homeowners there, partial to the look of concrete tile, are opting for tile-look and stone-coated metal as they replace their weather-tom roofs, Davis says. Indeed, notes Black, about 80 percent of the residential metal roofing market involves repairs or replacements rather than new construction.

At up to four times the cost of a standard asphalt roof, however, metal isn't a favorite among builders, who usually opt to upgrade consumer priorities like kitchens and entryways before sinking extra money into the roof, Black says.

Still, Black notes, custom builders are meandering toward metal, and he predicts that as more consumers become aware of metal's durability and new styles, production builders will follow.

For now, "it is a way for custom builders to differentiate their homes and provide value," he says.

Remodeler Gerry Donaghue says that's why he started pushing metal to the customers who hire him to build additions onto or reroof their homes.

"There are hundreds of guys who put on asphalt products," says the owner of Donaghue Construction Group in Nashua, N.H. "We wanted to be different from other contractors."

The profits followed. "For roofing contractors, it's a great opportunity," claims Black. "It's a product where they can make money. In asphalt shingles, a lot of the installation gets down to competing for the last 25 cents. But because metal and other premium roofing products require specialized installation, roofers can charge more for it, he says.

That's if they can find the help. While he hasn't had any trouble getting his hands on metal products during Florida's reroofing binge, Davis says he has a three-month backlog of jobs because he can't find enough qualified installers.

After contacting roofing manufacturers for referrals, he has imported installers from as far away as Minnesota, where roofers typically are dormant during snowy winters that put construction on hold.

Installation of metal roofs "has a learning curve to it," agrees Donaghue. But as the market for metal matures, roofers of all kinds are trying to learn, says Natalie Tanner, marketing manager for Decra Roofing Systems, whose shingle-like, metal-coated steel product, she says, is easier to install than the traditional metal sheets.

Glam Metal Detectives was a comedy show combining both sketch and sitcom elements, produced by the BBC in 1995. It was heavily promoted by the BBC but, possibly due to its attempts to innovate and combine genres, failed to catch the public imagination and only lasted one series of six episodes.
It starred Gary Beadle, Phil Cornwell, Doon Mackichan (playing most of the female roles), Sara Stockbridge, George Yiasoumi, and Mark Craven.
The show was designed to appear as if the viewer was channel surfing through a multi-channel wasteland, happening upon spoof adverts, short sketches, and recurring show elements. Like other BBC content of the mid-1990s (most notably KYTV), it often lampooned the harsh and low-quality satellite television available in the UK at the time.
Show segments included:
The Glam Metal Detectives themselves. A rock group charged with the mission of "saving the planet's ecology with your top-selling records", they would fight the evil media mogul Royston Brockade in between gigs.This segment, combined elements of the cultish, kitsch and televisual trash in what was intended as an innovative manner. Betty's Mad Dash - a supposed 1950s adventure serials, set in the 1930s, about two flappers, Betty and Maisie on the run from the police. Each episode involved hiding from the police in some period location and robbing from people at gunpoint. Bloodsports - a short segment portraying violent UK topics such as ram raiding as if they were recognised sports, complete with commentators. The Big Me - a chat show parody featuring Morag, who was extremely self-obsessed and egomanaical, ignoring her guests and instead talking about herself. Colin Corleone - a nondescript Londoner who acted as if he was as a mafia godfather, complete with henchmen; for example, when his dole is cut off because he refuses to work in Do It All, he arranges a 'hit' on the DSS office worker, shooting him with a water pistol while he has his lunch.

Metal detectors use electromagnetic induction to detect metal.
In 1881, Alexander Graham Bell constructed a crude metal detector in an attempt to find an assassin's bullet in President James Garfield. Gerhard Fischar patented a portable version in 1931.
Upright "archway" detectors are used at entrances to secured buildings, such as courthouses or airports, to detect metallic weapons which may be brought in. Small portable "wand" detectors are used by security staff to frisk persons for the same. Larger portable metal detectors are used by treasure hunters to locate metallic items, such as jewelry or coins, buried shallowly underground.
There are three types of metal detectors: beat frequency oscillator, induction balance, and pulse induction.
In a beat frequency oscillator detector, a coil is used as an inductor in an oscillator, whose frequency changes when metal causes its inductance to change. Another oscillator produces a close frequency, and audible beats between them signal metal. In an induction balance detector, there are two coils, usually gibbous with about 10% overlap, and a sine wave is transmitted with one coil and received with the other. The coils are adjusted so that there is no signal in the receive coil when there is no metal nearby. In a pulse induction detector, a pulse is generated (usually by cutting off an inductor) and sent through a coil and the detector listens for echoes. [edit]Metal detectors and archaeologyThe use of metal detectors to search for archaeological finds is practised both by archaeologists and hobbyists. In some European countries including France and Sweden the use of a metal detector is forbidden by law, unless one has special permission. This is intended to protect archaeological sites but rarely means that illicit metal detecting ('nighthawking') does not take place and has the effect that new sites found by metal detector are never publicised or investigated fully. Instead they are slowly plundered for their metal items, disturbing the stratigraphy and forcing the artefacts on to the Black Market, never to be seen again. In the United Kingdom metal detecting is generally permitted provided certain criteria are met and efforts are made to record finds through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The scheme has critics however, including some archaeologists and some metal detectorists themselves.
Countries with no restrictions or methods to deal with new finds in place are in danger of sites being regularly raided and their contents sold on without the information they provide ever being known. However, there are some responsible metal detectorists in unrestricted nations who contact archeologists when they find artifacts, and who never dig. They benefit archeology by finding artifacts for scientists.
Archaeologists use metal detectors to scan their spoil heaps and also to examine wide areas such as battlefield sites where surface scatters of metal objects may be all that survives. New metal detectors have small screens near the handle.

Metallic hydrogen results when hydrogen is sufficiently compressed and undergoes a phase change, and it is an example of degenerate matter. Metallic hydrogen consists of a lattice of atomic nuclei (namely protons) with a spacing that is significantly smaller than a Bohr radius; indeed, the spacing is more comparable with an electron wavelength (see De Broglie wavelength). The electrons are unbound and behave like the conduction electrons in a metal.
Discovery
Though topping the periodic table's alkali metal column, hydrogen is not, under ordinary conditions, an alkali metal itself. In 1935, however, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner predicted that under immense pressure, hydrogen atoms would indeed join their first group kin, relinquishing their proprietary hold over their electrons.
The pressures required made experimental verification elusive. In March 1996, however, a group of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported that they had serendipitously produced - for about a microsecond, and at temperatures of thousands of kelvins and pressures of over a million atmospheres - the first identifiably metallic hydrogen, ending the 60-year search.
The Lawrence Livermore team did not expect to produce metallic hydrogen, as they were not using solid hydrogen, thought to be necessary, and were working above the temperatures specified by metallization theory; furthermore, in previous studies in which solid hydrogen was compressed inside diamond anvils to pressures of up to 2.5 million atmospheres, detectable metallization did not occur. The team sought simply to measure the less extreme conductivity changes that they expected to take place.
The researchers used a 1960s-era light gas gun originally used in guided missile studies to shoot an impactor plate into a sealed container containing a half-millimetre-thick sample of liquid hydrogen. First, at one end of the gun, the hydrogen was cooled to about 20 K inside a container that included a battery connected by wires to a Rogowski coil and an oscilloscope; the wires also touched the surface of the hydrogen in several places, so the apparatus could be used to measure and record its electrical conductivity. At the opposite end, up to 3 kg (7 lb) of gunpowder was ignited, and the resulting explosion pushed a piston through a pump tube, compressing the gas inside. Eventually the gas reached a pressure high enough to throw a valve at the far end of the chamber. Entering the thin "barrel", it propelled the plastic-covered metal impactor plate into the container at up to 8 km/s (18,000 mph), compressing the hydrogen inside.
The scientists were stunned to find that as pressure rose to 1.4 million atmospheres, the electronic energy band gap (a measure of electrical resistivity) fell to almost zero.
The electronic energy band gap of hydrogen in its uncompressed state is about 15 eV, making it an insulator, but as pressure rises to almost unimaginable heights, the band gap gradually falls to 0.3 eV. Because 0.3 eV are provided by the thermal energy of the fluid (the temperature became about 3000 K due to compression of the sample), the hydrogen can at this point be considered fully metallic.
Astrophysics
Metallic hydrogen is present in tremendous amounts in the gravitationally compressed interiors of Jupiter, Saturn, and some of the newly discovered extrasolar planets. Because previous predictions of the nature of those interiors had taken for granted metallization at a higher pressure than the one at which we now know it to happen, those predictions must be adjusted. The new data indicate that much more metallic hydrogen exists inside Jupiter than thought, that it comes closer to the surface, and therefore that Jupiter's tremendous magnetic field, the strongest of any planet in the solar system, is, in turn, produced closer to the surface.

Latchways plc and their long standing partner in the standing seam roofing industry, Corus Building Systems, have recently identified an industry requirement for a new, lower profile fall arrest bracket to complement the existing range of non penetrative fall arrest systems for Kalzip roofing.

The new bracket is one third of the height of the traditional Kalzip fall arrest bracket, and can be colour coded to match the Kalzip roof colours for minimal visual impact.

The brackets are exclusively for use on Kalzip roof systems to provide safe hands-free access even to awkward areas.

The brackets have been designed to deform in the event of a fall, absorbing fall energy and ensuring that there is no deformation to the existing roof structure.

The non-penetrative clamps ensure that there is no chance of weather leakage, and that the 20 year Kalzip roof guarantee remains valid.

Workers attach directly onto the Kalzip fall arrest system by means of a Latchways Transfastener which rotates freely through the intermediate cable supports.

Once attached, the worker has complete versatility and freedom of movement whilst keeping both hands free.

All Latchways systems carry the CE mark, are constructed from high quality stainless steel components and conform to EN795.

Systems must be designed, installed, tested and certified by one of Latchways' network of approved installer companies.

John Murray Machinery, UK, agents for Reinhardt Maschinenbau (RAS), are pleased to announce two major orders for sheet metal folding machines worth over GBP 500,000 in total

The first is from Cardiff-based Euroclad (major UK suppliers of Roofing Products) who have ordered an RAS XXL-Centre for delivery in November. The XXL is a 6.4m x 1.5mm capacity automatic Folder for the forming of flashings and other roof profiles.

The machine with its automatic feed and up-and-down folding system is unique and the productivity increase is equivalent to around 4 standard Folders or Press Brakes.

This will be the third XXL installed in the UK.

The second order is from C and D (Sheet Metal) Engineering Limited of Belvedere in Kent for a RAS 79.26 Multibend-Centre.

C and D installed their first RAS Multibend-Centre - an RAS 79.22 (2160mm x 2mm capacity) - in early 2000.

The latest order is for the larger RAS 79.26 (2560mm x 2mm) and it will be installed in December this year.

They produce specialist Office Furniture for Universities, Libraries, etc.