How Do I Cut a Hole In a Roof Eavestrough for a Downspout?

LESLIE: Joe in Ontario, Canada is on the line. He’s got a question about gutters. How can we help you?

JOE: Yes, I want to find out if there’s a special way of making the hole to put the downspout in the eave trough.

TOM: To cut through the gutter for the downspout?

JOE: Yes.

TOM: Well, usually you do it with tin snips. So, you start with a small hole that you can make with a punch or with a drill and you stick a tin snip in there. And you basically snip out the circle for the downspout to go through and then you seal everything in place with rivets and caulk. Usually a silicone caulk. Keep in mind that there are right-hand and left-hand tin snips and so you want to choose the one that you’re going to be the most comfortable working with. But you can cut a pretty tight radius hole with that.

So, Joe, why are you putting your own downspouts in?

JOE: I’m just doing some repair work and I didn’t want to take them down and start over, so I just thought I would …

TOM: OK. So you just want to add one to it? Well, that makes sense. Yeah, that’s the way you do it. It’s really pretty straightforward.

Now, if it ends up sort of with an uneven cut, what you could do is you could hold a wood block under it and tap it with a hammer. It’ll bounce around a little bit. But if you tap between the bottom of the gutter and that wood block – just a tap, tap, tap, tap – it’ll kind if flatten it out and give you a better surface to seal that downspout plate to.

JOE: OK. There’s nothing that just like – where you can make a clean cut by just stamping it out?

TOM: Yeah. Well, it may be available but the thing is, it’s going to be expensive. This is just a one-off thing, so you’re going to cut it with tin snips. That’s what I would do.

JOE: OK. Thanks.