Ron,
By drip edge, I am thinking of a separate piece, probably aluminum, that gets nailed on top of the roof sheathing along the roof edges and overhangs the facia. We do not have the drip edges I just described. What you see in the pictures is just the bent facia protruding horizontally at the top of the facia under the overhanging shingles. Maybe the bent facia is also called a drip edge? If so, then we have drip edges.
Obed,
Go out to where your gable end intersects a spouting end on the first floor or out the dormer to this one, if being on your roof is safe for you. Lift up the edge of the roofing a little to see if the edge you see sticking out from the ground doesn't double back and go under the shingles an inch or more. You shouldn't see it on the spouting edge because it is put on before the roofing felt.
On a good job, you will not see it from the ground in either case. You have to look under the shingles on a gable end. Even then, if they put it under the felt, you won't see it but can tell it is there.
A single thickness of the coil stock is very thin and you can bend it with your fingers so if your trim is only 1 layer thick on top, as you say, don't put the weight of your body arm on it or you will bend it.
When it is double in a T shape you can usually even put a ladder against it without damage, but really shouldn't from your safety and your shingles that stick out beyond would put your body weight against it possibly bending it down.
One of the reasons that Peters plain Z bend is such a mess is because when they install it they are pushing up from the bottom against the plastic soffit material between it and the 2 x 4. The soffit panels are also thin and quite mushy except at the ribs.
So picture pushing something as pliable as coil stock, with one 90 degree bend, up against a mushy surface and the top end of the Z is pushing up against shingles that are hanging over the edge in an uneven, untrimmed, unsupported mess.
Then try to get nails into the flat surface as you work your way down the fascia with probably another guy doing the same thing on the other end 10 ft. away, working up. ( As a one man job it is even worse). Peters pictures show the results......:thumbdown:
When the fascia has a T top, the top is nailed down first to the top of the roof. This lets everything normalize. Then if the fascia is face nailed or nailed from the bottom as BuilderML does it,
if the bends were in the right dimensional locations, nothing gets squeezed by nailing or has been forced over a lip, so it looks good and doesn't wrinkle except at the end where the bottom bend back had to be cut off to fit flat over the soffit box trim. That even is not a normal thing.. Sometimes they leave the tail of the gable fascia just a little too long and when the spouting is put up on the soffit
ends it usually is cut a little longer than the soffit fascia so you see a straight line when looking up along the edge at the side of the roof. If the back of the spouting pushes against the too long of tail it says "ouch" and warbles a little bit since there is no bottom of the Z to support it.
See my little attachments showing in a black line what your metal would look like without or with a T top.
Ron