What Makes Great American Different — The Soldering Standard Explained

When homeowners ask what sets Great American Roofing apart from other contractors in Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Southern Indiana, the answer often surprises them: it comes down to how we handle the metal. Specifically, how we treat the flashings — the metal components that seal every critical transition on your roof. Most roofing contractors seal those transitions with caulk. We solder them. Here's why that decision matters, and why it's the standard we've upheld for 29 years of roofing.

What Is Flashing and Why Does It Matter?

Flashing is the system of metal sheets, strips, and formed pieces installed wherever your roof surface changes direction or meets another surface. Think of every place where water might find a seam to exploit: the base of a chimney, where a dormer wall meets the roof slope, around skylights, at valley intersections, where your roof meets a sidewall, around pipe penetrations and vent boots.

Flashing is installed under or over shingles in an overlapping pattern that channels water away from these vulnerable transitions and down the roof surface. When flashing is properly installed and sealed, it creates a weathertight barrier that lasts decades. When it's not — when the seams between metal pieces are inadequately sealed — you get leaks. And not just any leaks: flashing failures are famously difficult to diagnose because water can travel significant distances from the breach before appearing inside your home.

Across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, flashing failures are among the most common causes of roof-related water damage we encounter when we inspect homes. Often, a homeowner has been chasing the same interior stain for years through multiple repair attempts — and every time, the root cause was a flashing seam that was never properly sealed in the first place.

The Standard Practice: Caulk

When two pieces of metal flashing meet — at a chimney corner, at a valley termination, at a step flashing transition — the seam between them needs to be waterproofed. The industry standard approach is roofing caulk: a flexible sealant applied to lap joints, corner seams, and penetration edges.

Caulk is fast. Caulk is easy. Caulk requires no specialized skill or tooling. That's why it's ubiquitous. But caulk has a fundamental physical limitation: it moves. Rooftop temperatures in a Cincinnati summer can exceed 150°F on a dark surface. In winter, that same surface may be below 0°F during an ice event. Caulk expands and contracts with these temperature swings — and over time, it cracks, peels, and pulls away from the metal surfaces it's supposed to seal.

A caulked flashing seam that was watertight when the job was completed may open up within three to five years, or even sooner on a dark south-facing slope. When it opens, you get a leak — often in a location that's very difficult to trace without a trained eye. The "fix" is typically more caulk, which starts the same cycle over again.

Our Standard: Soldered Metal Flashings

We solder our flashing seams. That means using a soldering iron and tin solder to fuse the metal-to-metal connections at every critical flashing transition on the roof. When done correctly, a soldered joint is a permanent, monolithic connection — not a flexible seal that cycles through stress and eventually fails.

Soldering requires the right materials (we use tin — specifically terne-coated metal — which accepts solder reliably), the right tooling, and the skill to execute clean joints consistently. It takes longer than applying caulk. It requires a craftsman who understands both the metallurgy and the geometry of how water moves on a roof. That's part of why most roofing contractors don't do it: it's a specialized skill, and the time and training required don't fit the production model that most volume contractors operate under.

The Tin Man Technique

In the roofing trade, practitioners who work extensively with tin metal flashings are sometimes called "tin men" — a nod to the traditional sheet metal craft that pre-dates modern polymer caulks and adhesive membranes. The tin man approach to a complex roof transition doesn't ask "what do I put in this gap?" — it asks "how do I form the metal so there is no gap?"

In practice, this means custom-forming flashings on site to fit the specific geometry of each roof detail, overlapping and locking seams mechanically where possible, and soldering the joints that remain. A properly executed tin man installation around a chimney, for example, involves:

• Step flashings woven between courses of shingles on the side planes
• A custom-formed counterflashing, or cap flashing, that embeds into the mortar joint of the chimney above the step flashings
• A formed cricket (a small peaked structure) behind wide chimneys to divert water around rather than into the chimney base
• Soldered corner and transition joints throughout, creating a fully integrated metal system rather than a series of individual pieces held together by sealant

The result is a chimney flashing system that doesn't rely on any single sealant to remain waterproof. Even if the overlying shingles are replaced one or two more times, the metal flashing system beneath can continue performing indefinitely.

Why It Matters for Long-Term Leak Prevention

The practical benefit of soldered flashings is simple: they don't fail in the ways that caulked flashings do. A soldered joint doesn't crack in cold weather. It doesn't shrink away from the metal surface in summer heat. It doesn't need to be re-applied every few years.

For homeowners in Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Southern Indiana — a region that routinely experiences both extreme heat and ice events in the same calendar year — that thermal stability is critical. Our climate is one of the most demanding for roofing systems, with temperature swings that accelerate the degradation of any material that relies on adhesion rather than mechanical connection.

When we complete a roof replacement, the soldered flashing standard is built into the job. It's not an upgrade. It's how we've done it for 29 years, because we believe every homeowner deserves a roof that doesn't come back to leak at the transitions. To learn more about our philosophy and history, visit our about page.

What to Ask Any Roofing Contractor

Before hiring any roofing contractor in the Greater Cincinnati region, ask them directly: "How do you seal your flashing seams?" If the answer is caulk — and only caulk — you now know what that means for the long-term performance of your roof. A contractor who doesn't solder isn't necessarily cutting corners in every respect, but they are accepting a known failure mode that soldering eliminates.

You can also ask to see how they handle the back of a chimney on a wide-chimney installation (does their scope include a cricket?), how they terminate valley flashings, and whether they replace or reuse existing flashing when doing a full replacement. The answers tell you a lot about the quality standard a contractor holds themselves to.

We're happy to walk any homeowner through exactly what we plan to do on their specific roof before we start. Transparency about our process is part of how we've built the reputation we have across this region after 29 years of roofing.