Knock-throughs

We've arrived at the knocking through stage of the job, and it's proved to be one of the most difficult steel configurations we've done. The engineer has designed a steel goal post construction quite different to the norm. Instead of resting the main beam on two vertical columns, the main beam slots between the verticals and bolts through into them. At first I thought this seemed like a strange idea as in my mind there seemed far too much weight resting on 8 bolts. That was until the bolts arrived!

Having discussed the idea with the building inspector he explained that this is becoming a popular design. The engineer 'bods' think that the weight is more evenly distributed on the steel by bolting through, putting less stress on the join between the vertical and horizontal beams. Far be it from a lowly blue-collar worker like me to question them!

Initially I thought this configuration would be easier to install as the main beam is shorter than the width of the room, and just had to be hoisted up in-between the vertical beams and then bolted. In fact it proved to be very difficult and time consuming as the distance between the vertical beams had to be exactly the right size to the millimetre. This is quite a task when lifting steel beams which weigh in excess of 200kg each!

Eventually we located all the beams with the help of a "Muba lifter" (as seen in pictures) and plenty of pairs of hands. The bolt holes lined up well with a bit of encouragement, and the rest of the packing was done as standard.

It's always a big sigh of relief getting the main beam in, it's a fairly dangerous job and the materials are very expensive, so any slight errors in production can prove costly and cause major problems.