A good days work is always tiring and I love to see the steel leave the shop . We fabricated & shipped about 25 tons this week and I'm ready for the lazy boy .
Hope youall had a good week .

Thanks
Kurt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2016 09:03AM by kurt wag.

Good Job Kurt!

That chair is well deserved!!!

Gary

(Thanks for posting! )

All one project?

Lon

Hi Lon
It's only part of a project . It is down in your neighbor hood too . It a heliport" landing pad" for helicopters on the roof of a building . It's nice big steel and a lot of full penetration welding . We've done a few them all over the country . The ones in earth quake zones are really built bullet proof .

Thanks
Kurt

You DA MAN Kurt!!!

Now THAT'S a classy project. Nobody wants to land their $20M Bird on a bunch of junk. AL-LOY, AL-LOY, ALLOY !!!

Thanks for the cheer Gary !
We made this outta aluminum beams 15 years or so ago . It's maybe 8'-0" tall and 25'-0" long . BTW. I ain't " da man " no mo ! I'm just an old guy running the shop . My guys in the shop are the best and I couldn't do it without them .

Thanks
Kurt

Hi Kurt,

You make that O from flat sheet and band strap - or can you really stretch and compress "I" beam that much in your shop?

Gary

Gary
Only you would ask that question about the letter O . It was made from flat stock alum . We can't roll beams in our shop the hard way but hire them out when needed . It was a too small radius to roll without major stretch and shrink producing cracks and wrinkles . We were going for the industrial / bolt together look at the time and we made it for a job fair at the time . It was hanging from our crane 100 ft or so in the air . We had to tie it off with a tag line cause of the wind . YOLLA /ALLOY hehe .

I did get an email advert from one of our rolling sources a couple months ago that showed a video that incorporates heat to decrease the tolerances making more possible for hard way rolling . Simple flat one / D rolling has hard way and easy way as I'm sure you can understand . Helical is a whole different animal .

Thanks
Kurt

Kurt,
That's a ton of work..... Ha...Do you guys pre assemble it to make sure all the parts fit like they should? I'm sure it's not easy getting all the dimensions in tolerance with such big work pieces!! You guys do a good job!
Nice work!

Matt

Howdy Matt
We usually don't bolt large jobs together for testing . Multiple story buildings are not possible to pre fit .We have done segmental erecting where you build a story/ floor at a time on the ground and the swing into place and stack them . It's safer but involved big cranes . We did do a job a couple yrs ago that was a huge letter A for lack of a better term , that we fit up in the parking lot . It was going out of the country and we didn't detail in house . It was made out of W40" beams at the base that was about 80-0" wide and 175-0" tall with progressively smaller beams and tons of bracing and moment connections on the way to the top of the structure . We made huge pivot points on the top and bottom a sort of hinge . It was a conveyor support for a mining company . Since we made so many of them AND they were going on a boat we fit the first one per customers request .

When we detail in house we use a modeling program that lets you see clashes before you fabricate . It's a 3~D model you can rotate and inspect prior to authorizing the job .
It's extremely accurate and very seldom mistakes . Missing info is common in the drawings but easy to click on the model for dimensions . Most of the guys in the shop can't recognize the jobs because they see beams and channels and angles on each print . The model really helps understand just WHAT your making and how they fit together . Just for the quality side of things we are allowed 1/8" bilateral tolerance but usually stay within 1/16" in running dim @ 20-0" . Not cumulative / graduating . I'll bet you WISH you had those parameters in your shop hey ?

Apples and oranges

Thanks

Thanks
Kurt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2016 07:14PM by kurt wag.

Kurt,
I can imagine moving all that heavy steel around can be stressfull not much room for error when getting things to fit up properly! There is a steel tubing factory down the road where I live, it's called Michigan seamless tubing/ MST for short. They are always picking up and dropping huge tubes with giant cranes and lifts when they drop one you can here it from a mile away!!

The 3d modeling programs you guys use sounds like they are well worth it! Especially for the accuracy of making huge parts....scraping parts is never fun but it happens to the best of us, done it once or twice ha! To hold a 1/16" is very impressive in big structures especially after putting heat into the steel from welding!

Again nice work,

Matt

Looks sturdy, that's for sure! Elevated helipads have some unique design requirements regarding impact loads, fire/heat tolerance, and corrosion resistance. They're not a purely static structure, since they're intended to withstand decades of repeated strain from multi-ton helicopters taking off and landing (sometimes less than gracefully ), along with corrosive elements like de-icing salt, blood, weather, bird droppings, etc. Then there's the whole issue of whether or not it's strong enough to withstand the intense heat of a fiery helicopter crash without melting/failing and dropping the whole mess onto/through the roof of an occupied high-rise building. That last bit is the part that gives fire marshals everywhere the willies.

The hospital where I used to work in NM also had a refueling point built into the helipad structure up on the roof. The bulk fuel was stored in an underground tank five stories below, and was pumped up as needed in a self-draining double-walled pipe arrangement. We had multiple fire-fighting systems on the roof, including a remotely activated AFFF (aqueous film-forming-foam) system with automatic, self-swiveling nozzles at all four corners and a stand-alone power system, they really went all-out. The fire marshal still hated us though, probably because it was located directly above the neonatal intensive care unit. Running a worst-cases scenario on that undoubtedly kept him up nights

When they remodeled that wing of the hospital, I think they relocated the helipad to the top of the parking garage.