Incredible responses...thank you everyone. I have some more questions, please.
All the load? The footings are already doing that and haven’t experienced a local/general bearing failure. Thank you for sharing your experience btw.
I have his reports but no calcs. Can’t tell what he checked (or...
We do this a lot. You end up paying less attention to the steel and more attention to everything else. You can get a good spatial idea of how hot the fire burned by examining all involved materials. Cable jacketing melts at one temperature; concrete can turn pink at another. There have been...
Local contractor sells underpinning services to homeowners. Jurisdiction requires a sealed engineering report before issuing a permit for the work. Their last guy retired; I’ve seen his work. Enter me: seems like a good potential source of revenue, low hanging fruit. Totally new line of work for...
Assembly uses are specifically exempted from live load reduction, per 4.7.5 and Table 4.3-1, which I’m assuming you knew since the uniform live load is from the same table. To address the later question: I really wouldn’t fiddle with the 100 psf. You cannot reason the same mean and coefficient...
A variation of this detail is extremely common in DC; the new retaining wall is usually inboard of the existing foundation wall, which isn’t deepened. Only way to get more space out of an 1800s rowhome.
Up to the client and their wallet.
For a house in Tennessee: we showed our fairly sophisticated client the different statistical windspeeds broken down by return period to include/exclude thunderstorms and compared that to ASCE’s curve (right column). Then we showed them how that turned into...
Thread '360 degree photography'
https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/360-degree-photography.528154/
Great when access is limited or unsafe. Also fun to drive around a building or property with the camera mounted to the roof rack.
Same exact response as @Ingenuity. Chip out (and repair) bottom cover at midspan and also some side cover at the very ends to look for any jacketing. I’ll add that you might be able to gather additional information from the end-faces of the DTs, assuming you can fit an inspection mirror into the...
No theory required. Just, “15 in 10k code-compliant bldgs fail over a 50-year period.” It’s enough to get people thinking in terms of probabilities.
We already have the Beaufort scale and the Enhanced Fujita scale to relate wind speeds to building damage and “how it feels” to someone standing...
Sometimes we provide construction administration services, and sometimes we don’t. Jobs almost always turn out better when we’re involved. No last-minute funny business; we’re not that desperate for work. “Oops I built it without telling you” is not compelling.
I gotta say, I was pretty “don’t mess with the code” (wrote a whole thesis about it) until I took a graduate-level reliability class. Knowing the very little that I do, now, about Turkstra’s Rule and Code Levels and such, I can’t find it in me to complain.
The code-writers know this sucks for us:
