cold-formed steel design fees

[gte447f]

Anyone willing to share their experience, strategies or advice on how to best go about estimating fees to design and detail (i.e. draw) cold-formed steel work, particularly exterior curtain walls? Thanks in advance.

 

[CANPRO]

Its a tough one to estimate. I do a fair amount of work in that area and the jobs can range from very easy to very painful. Sometimes its just a matter of drawing a couple of wall sections and checking the studs/mullions for strength/deflection. If its a large project you might end up with dozens of wall sections (with many different stud sizes/guages) and a lot of details to cover different window sizes (considering all the different stud sizes/guages).

Another thing that can have a big influence on your price is the quality of the architectural drawings. If they are well done and easy to follow your detailing work will be smooth...on the other hand you might spend a whole day just marking up the drawings to figure out which part of the building is in your scope of work. Whether or not you can get the CAD drawings from the architect will make a difference as well. Lately I see a trend where they are charging people for the their CAD...I have found that it is usually worth the money when you consider the time it takes to recreate the details/sections/key plans.

With all that said we usually try to do these jobs at an hourly rate...they don't tend to be big money makers, but they keep you busy.

 

[gte447f]

CANEIT, I agree regarding the effect of the quality of the architectural drawings. I have found that with a good comprehensive set of architectural drawings I can usually estimate my effort by considering the time to replicate each of the architectural wall sections.

Recently I was asked for a quote on a job with a very poor set of architectural and structural drawings (i.e. with regard to the cold-formed steel portion of the project), and so I was forced to use a different method to estimate my fee. I added a bit of fee to account for the extra time that I thought would be required to obtain the information that was missing from the construction drawings. Well, apparently I was high, because I didn't get the job. Probably a blessing in disguise not to get that job, but nonetheless, this is the reason for my original question. Thanks for your input.