It’s one thing to explore color and quality of asphalt shingles for your home – but have you ever explored the way shingles are made?
The manufacturing process to produce asphalt shingles includes passing the base materials that continuously adds other components. Although shingles seem like simple elements, the process has a lot of steps to ensure the utmost quality materials are used on your home. Do you want to understand the approach and roofing market trends? Read below!
The Manufacturing Process
Not many people understand how products are made – and that includes asphalt shingles. The shingle manufacturing process is methodological and has many steps in order to produce a quality product:
- Dry Looping – First off, an organic or fiberglass mat is mounted and used in a roofing machine, known as a dry looper. The material goes through the dry looper in preparation for saturation.
- Saturation – Next, the base material passes through the pre-saturation chamber of the asphalt saturator. One side of the material is sprayed with hot asphalt to vaporize water preset on the base material and then is fed into saturator tank filled entirely with asphalt. This asphalt soaking coats the material’s fibers and fills any gaps between them.
- Wet Looping – Similar to dry looping, the material is formed into accordion-like folds, but this time, allows the asphalt coating on the mat to cool. As the material cools, the asphalt is drawn into the felt material, creating additional saturation.
- Coating – Coating the mat surfaces with powdered minerals is the next step. After both the sides of the mat pass through the asphalt coating rolls, the shingles are completed by mineral surfacing, and the final cooling and cutting stages.
- Mineral Surfacing – The coating phase is followed by applying granules of ceramic-coated minerals on top of the asphalt-coated map. The treated mat is then passes through rollers that embed and cool the granules into the asphalt.
- Finishing – The asphalt is finished by a final cooling stage, cutting, and packaging. Once cooled accordion-style, the asphalt sheets are passed through a cutting machine that cuts the asphalt into a specific size and shape. The shingles are separated, stacked, and transferred to equipment that wraps and labels the materials.
Shingles & Roofing Technology Trends
The past few decades have helped shift technology associated with the asphalt manufacturing process. Instead of shingles made by hand, we now live in a world where elaborate designs, shapes, and colors of asphalt shingles can be created by machine. As the process continues to be refined, it will be interesting to see how this affects the roofing industry and CertainTeed roof shingle manufacturing.
Whether you have questions about a roofing quote, the best shingle color for your home, or the manufacturing process of asphalt shingles, our team is here for you and your needs. Let us know with your questions, and speak with an roofing expert on our team. We’ll do our best to provide you with the resources we have at hand to make your roofing experience an excellent one.
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