Have you ever wondered how the vertical standing seam panels are lined up correctly on a gable roof? As you know a gable roof is a simple up and over roofline much like a small two-man pup tent is. In this case, you simply measure to the middle to determine how wide a panel to start with. Then you start at one end and install the panels one at a time working from one end to the other.
On a hip roof, it is much more difficult. If you look at a hip roof you will notice a that as the hip goes from the peak to the eave that each panel gets shorter until it ends. Therefore if you started at one end the panel would be so small that it would be impossible to know if it was correctly lined up until about the halfway point. Most metal roof installers make the panels and loosely lay them on the deck until they get to the halfway point. Then they get them lined up and start seaming them. This is still not very precise. As far as I know, we are the only installers that hand make a double male leg panel. We install this panel in the very center and then we install all the panels to the left and then start at the middle and install all of the panels to the right to make a perfectly aligned roof. As you can see from this photo the center panel is the panel we installed first. Then we installed from the center out all the panels on the left and right. The difficult part is hand make the center panel. Our installers excel at hand made flashing and you can’t tell the difference between their hand bent panel and the machine extruded panels.