Aluminium coping is one of those elements of a building that most people walk past without a second thought — but get the installation wrong and you’ll know about it. Water ingress, wind damage, buckling profiles. Done right, it’s a clean, low-maintenance finish that protects the top of a parapet wall for decades.
We recently filmed a full aluminium coping installation on a live construction site using the Aluclad system, and we wanted to give a proper breakdown of what the process actually involves — from setting out right through to the finished product.
You can watch the full video below.
Starting with the corners
Every coping installation starts at the corners. Before anything else goes on, corner brackets are fixed and levelled — these become the reference point for everything that follows.
On outside corners, you’ll also see what are called half brackets fitted underneath the angle. These aren’t for carrying the coping itself — they’re there to resist wind uplift. On an exposed outside corner, the coping takes more force than anywhere else on the run, so these brackets are an important detail that shouldn’t be skipped.
Once the corners are set, string lines are run between them and the intermediate brackets are set out at 1 metre centres along the wall.
Setting out the brackets
With the string lines in place, every bracket can be positioned accurately and at the right level. On some jobs, packing is needed behind brackets to account for an uneven substrate — this is normal and worth taking time over. Getting this stage right makes everything that follows much easier.
On this particular job, the client also asked for the fixing holes to be siliconed before and after fixing — a simple step that reduces the risk of water tracking behind the bracket and into the wall.
Neoprene strips
Before any coping goes on, neoprene strips are placed on top of each bracket. These are what the underside of the coping profile sits and compresses against when it’s clipped into place.
At join points — where two lengths of coping meet — a double bracket is used, with a neoprene strip either side of the joint. This, combined with the 3 to 4mm expansion gap left between each coping section, is how the system manages both water ingress and thermal movement. Aluminium expands and contracts with temperature changes, and those gaps are there by design.
Fitting the coping
The Aluclad coping profile clips on in a straightforward sequence — onto the outside edge first, pushed over the bracket, then clipped down on the inside. Once the inside clip engages, the profile is secure.
On buildings where the coping is three or four metres off the ground, the team will also add an additional fixing on the inside down stand. It’s a small extra step, but it’s much easier to do at the time than to scaffold back up later if something needs attention.
Coping lengths can be supplied in standard 1m, 2m or 3m runs, or cut bespoke to suit the job — which is what was required here, as the profiles had to match an existing coping already on the building.
Complex details: T-sections
Not every coping run is a straight line. On this job there was a T-section — a point where three parapet walls met at a single junction, each with a different wall width and each with a sloping coping profile running in a different direction.
Sloping coping is designed to shed water inward toward the roof rather than over the face of the building. Managing three different slopes on one fabricated piece of aluminium takes accurate measurement and careful fabrication. It’s the kind of detail that separates a quality installation from one that causes problems down the line.
Want to know more?
If you’re specifying or installing aluminium coping and have questions about the Aluclad system or any of the other systems we work with, get in touch.
