5/12 is nothing - up to 6/12 is easy to maintain your balance. Just don't wear hard, slick soled shoes.
Beyond 6/12 is where it gets dicey and depends on your skill and balance. I can do 9/12 without heart failure. Any steeper than that and I am looking for something (valley, ridge, vent stack) to hold on to.
Just the other day I watched a couple of guys on the roofing crew I use scamper all over a 12/12 without a care in the world. I am speculating that their extremely large testicles gave then a lower center of gravity and good balance.
Originally posted by Basketball1234: How do you walk on a 5/12 roof? Is it hard? How do you walk down it? without falling off.
We just did a 5/12 roof, and this is generally not too bad, but it depends on the kind of roof. For metal roofing we like soft rubber shoes with fine line sole patterns. Walmart sells a very good one with a name like Treadsafe or something like that. One trick if walking down the roof is to keep your feet parallel with the roof edge. If the roof is very high we like to put a scaffold around the edge of the roof as a worst case safety. This lets you work freely on the roof unlike a tethered fall arrest, but still have a back-up if you fall. Good luck with it.
Rick Merlander Molokai Hawaii
Posts: 14 | Location: Molokai Hawaii | Registered: Dec 30, 2011
osha would love to hear about this, roof was so steep my helper used an extension cord as a lanyard. LOL his eyes were as wide as a saucer and white as a sheet but he didnt die, he only had to change his drawers
Posts: 3277 | Location: I live in southern mississippi | Registered: Jun 01, 2008
