Shingle Nail Placement
Placing shingle nails so the water channeling down every butt joint above never crosses a nail hole.
Nail a Replacement Shingle Without Bending Back the Course Above
Technique: Nail Under a Sealed Shingle
The Problem
Every shingle is nailed near its top edge and then covered by the course above, which seals down onto it in the sun. To replace one shingle in the middle of a field, you have to get a nail into that covered zone — and to get to it you're lifting the shingle above.
On a roof that's a few years old that's fine. On one that's fifteen years old and shedding granules, it isn't: the mat has gone stiff, the sealant strip has cured hard, and bending the course back far enough to swing a hammer cracks the shingle you were trying not to disturb. Now you have two to replace instead of one, and the second one has the same problem.
The Technique
The RoofSnake is a long flat steel bar with a slot at the working end that captures a roofing nail. It gets the nail to the right place through a gap far smaller than your hand needs.
- Slide the new shingle up into position under the course above.
- Seat a roofing nail in the tool's slot at the working end.
- Slide the tool up under the overlapping shingle until the nail is over the nailing zone of the shingle you're fastening. You're lifting the course above by the thickness of the bar, not by the width of a hammer swing.
- Strike the tool's exposed end to drive the nail home through the shingle beneath.
- Withdraw the tool and press the lifted shingle back down.
Working through the tool is worth watching once before you try it — the placement of the strike is the part that reads better in motion than on a page.
Pro tip: Warmth is doing half the work either way. Cold asphalt shingles crack when they flex, so a repair like this goes better on a mild afternoon than a cold morning — and on a hot roof the sealant strips release more easily, which is the other half of the problem. If a shingle cracks anyway, replace it rather than sealing the crack; it's already the failure you came up to fix.
Pro tip: Know when a patch is the wrong answer. If the roof is shedding granules across the whole slope and the mat is brittle everywhere you touch it, every repair breaks another shingle and buys a few months. That's a re-roof conversation, not a tool problem — and if the roof is under an active insurance claim, check what disturbing the surrounding courses does to it before you start.
Safety note: Roof work means fall protection: harness and anchor on anything with real pitch or height, boots with grip, and no working a wet, frosted, or heat-softened roof. Loose granules act like ball bearings underfoot, and a roof worn enough to need this repair is a roof that's shedding them.
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