Hopefully I'm not pushing the boundaries here. I'm writing my Master's project which relates to plasterboard usage in construction (very simplified, it's a part of a much larger project ongoing for my client).
As part of this, I am comparing New Zealand practice to international practice...
I am assessing a weld plate detail beneath a braced frame in an old building. It uses D12 (sorry you imperialist, you're going to have to adapt to the metric system) with pretty shallow hooks
It's not dimensionsed but the overall length is 'ex 250mm' and it scales to approx 150x100 hook (150...
This one coming at you from the wonderful world of DIY
I've put a 125sq post in for my (low) retaining wall, don't like it, and wish I'd used a 150mm square post to match some others I put in previously
The problem is, it's concreted 600mm into the ground and I don't feel like pulling it out...
Howdy,
Designing a big ol wall for a client that is ~3.4m high + footing (3.8m overall)
The face is supposedly mostly rock, so the wall is mostly retaining its own backfill
As you'd expect, using typical retaining wall theory I'm getting pretty big loads that make a realistic wall unachieavable...
The current weekend DIY project is to replace the "retaining wall" alongside my driveway that supports my neighbour's lawn. I say 'retaining wall' loosely as it is literally four trees chainsawed to height with some planks behind it...
Anyway, we've made great progress getting the posts in and...
We do a lot of houses that use a ring-and-pile foundation i.e., concrete perimeter and internal timber piles
The perimeter is typically a 300mm wide trench and that has no polythene in it
We increase steel side cover from 50mm to 75mm for pouring against dirt and away we go
Yesterday I was on...
I'm looking at top mounting a balustrade into an existing 200mm high masonry wall around my deck
This is outside the manufacturer's recommendations and they're not being very helpful, so I'm probably going off piste to design my own solution
It's a pretty darn windy area so I actually want to do...
I'm dealing with a pretty common scenario in residential alterations: putting in a new timber beam that terminates at the perimeter walls
Obviously I can use steel and avoid this problem, but timber is significantly more preferred in alterations for the flexibility and ease of connecting...
Hopefully my image upload works...
I turned up to inspect a site today and noticed a steel beam floating in space
Turns out the blockies got the column height wrong and need to add an extra half block under this beam
They were planning to do this with the beam in-situ; it cannot be readily...
Howdy all,
I do my beam moment-capacity calculations from a typical spreadsheet that bases the capacity off a concrete strain of 0.003 and uses the stress block stuff - the same as you all do no doubt.
This is all fine and dandy until you run into a situation like mine, where you have steel...
A topic of discussion in the office presently as I have just been getting some RFIs from a contractor on retaining wall backfill.
We have been specifying 'free-draining compacted backfill' and leaving it vaguely there, which opens it up to interpretation
I have now been presented with three...
Howdy all,
My boss and I just went down a rabbit hole that ultimately neither of us know the answer to.
Imagine a building over deep, stiff concrete piles that transfer loads to bedrock say 25m below ground level (the numbers don't matter, this is an academic discussion primarily)
Presumably...
Hey all,
I'm working on a job in construction at the moment
The design is for 375x375mm or 500x500mm shallow (400mm deep) pile footings to bear on clean sands to support a timber subfloor above - pretty normal
The design bearing given by the geotech was relatively low, hence the large footings...
Hey all,
Epoxy anchors are all the rage these days and their performance seems to be getting better and better as time goes on.
One contractor that we work with does fall arrest installations and that naturally involves epoxying in M16 rods
Typically our standard spec has been 125mm as this has...
This started as me wanting to do some DIY at home but also has some benefit to engineering
Obviously, plenty of screws exist that self-tap into timber and don't require pre-drilling
Equally, screws now exist with winged heads that allow for self-tapping into steel
But does anything exist that...
Hey team,
Coming at you live from another office technical discussion...do you include wind face loads (out of plane loads) in the design of your steel / timber lintels? This is in a residential context but I suppose would be fairly comparable in commercial too.
Common sense says yes, wind...
I am assessing the liquefaction susceptibility of several sites based off CPT data. The edge of the site has a drainage swale approximately 2.75m from top to bottom and evenly battered over about 8.2m horizontally (i.e. ~18 degree flat slope). The groundwater table seems to hover around 2.5-3m...
Howdy all
A trend here in NZ is for almost all fixings (at least in residential) to go to epoxy post-fixed anchors rather than cast-in.
As engineers we much prefer to spec cast-in bolts for capacity, but contractors push for post-fixed as they give significant tolerance
This is particularly...
