Thoughtclaw
Structural
I'm the staff engineer for a smallish contractor. A customer has come to us needing more head room over a machine they want to bring in. There are 30" bar joists in the area, and they were hoping to replace those with 6" beams if possible. My analysis shows they need at least a W8x15 (it's a 20' span), and they said they can work with that. My initial approach was to put a new frame up with columns just inside each wall. Our chief estimator came up with a much less costly option, and it seems to me it could work, but as I'm still fairly green, I thought I'd run it past you folks. His idea is to weld a plate to the top chord of the bar joist, then seat the beam on an angle that's bolted to that plate. I've never analyzed such a thing and am not really sure how to go about doing so, but I'm confident I can figure it out. But before I dug into it, I thought I'd seek some outside opinions from those more experienced than I. I've attached his very rough sketch of the idea. Any thoughts?