Tile roof repairs

Did you ever have one of those days where you want to search down the roofer who did the past repairs and beat them with the roofer's hand book??? well today was that day for me...

We are repairing a 50+ year old Ludowici flat tile roof, with molded ridge caps... Well one of the past roofers thought it would be a great idea to roof cement every tile ( 3 courses down from the ridge )and the ridge cap. Now I have to remove the ridge caps to repair several tiles below...

Trying to chisel them free does not work; a thin scraper could not free them without cracking; I tried a sawzall to cut the roof cement, but with not great success...

So my question to the group... any other ideas ???

Possible next trys...... a heat gun to loosen up the cement, rotozip saw, more sawzall work.

Dealing with plastic cement and tile is a "there are no rules" proposition. It varies with almost every situation. Last week I had a situation where we were retrofitting a ridge vent system on a house where the tile had been sealed to the ridge nailer with plastic cement.

The routine that worked was to remove one tile (it broke) and then hammer the side of the ridge nailer (a 2x3) to break the bond with the plastic cement, then pry the tile up from the bottom until you felt the nail move, then yank it out with a hard pull. Then to remove the plastic cement, we used a chisel. Most of the time it broke loose with one swift, hard blow. We broke about 10 % of them.

Man have I been there! Normally with me it is slate that people do that with. I call those "roofers" tarmites, and Joe Jenkins from the slate roofers Association calls them Neanderthals. Well put! If you don't know what the heck you are doing on a hard surface roof, stay the hell off!

With slate when you run into something like that, you just keep taking off slates till you get to where there is no tar and start to put it back together again. I would almost bet that you are going to have to take of the tiles and throw them away and get replacement used tiles to do the work. A $5,000.00 + fix for a $500 repair! The worst part of that is that those clowns CHARGED the home owner for the previous "repair" How much does quality cost?