Wednesday, June 11, 2008

On Pushing String: Engineering and Common Sense






So, yeah, this wasn't exactly what we were hoping to hear back from our structural engineer. I think a good rule of thumb is that any time a consultant puts more exclamation points on one of your drawings than numbers, its a safe bet that something isn't working quite right. Harriet was a bit confused by all the changes that we have been making to the steel - I realized that the last time she actually ran any analysis of the scheme was quite a few iterations ago. But she has been looking at drawings all along and we had a sit-down with her just a few days ago so I was pretty surprised at . . . well . . . . her surprise. I thought we had pretty clearly articulated our changes, but I guess not. Sigh.

Structurally, I think the scheme will be just fine. Yes - some of the member sizes and the connection sizes / bolts will change after a real analysis, but there is a certain amount of common sense to a small project like this and I've built enough stuff to know what stands up and what falls down. Harriet was worried that by moving the rafters off to the sides of the columns the frame is no longer able to resist any lateral forces. But we had put a channel down the sides of all the frames which to my mind was doing the exact same thing as the rafter! For some reason though she didn't seem to consider it. But we chatted about it and we'll end up putting C down both sides of the frame, and then we can still throw our rafters to the outside.

Either way - Johnny and I had to redraw everything yesterday and hopefully we'll be going down to Harriet's office later today to talk about it all with her. Wish us luck!

1 comment:

Mostapha Sadeghipour said...

Good Luck! I'm not a structure engineer, but I think your bracing joints to the columns are not gonna work as well...BTW I wish you to be succeed.:).