Welcome to our Structural Engineering Blog! I’m Paul McEntee, Engineering R&D Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie. We’ll cover a variety of structural engineering topics here that I hope interest you and help with your projects and work. Social media is “uncharted territory” for a lot of us (me included!), but we here at Simpson Strong-Tie think this is a good way to connect and even start useful discussions among our peers in a way that’s easy to use and doesn’t take up too much of your time.
Please help us make this a lively and useful forum by commenting on our posts (take a look at our How To Post A Comment page and our Community Guidelines for guidance). And please subscribe – you will receive an email with our most recent post (usually once a week).
Thanks for stopping by; I hope you enjoy our posts and take part in the conversation.
Author: Paul McEntee
A couple of years back we hosted a “Take your daughter or son to work day,” which was a great opportunity for our children to find out what their parents did. We had different activities for the kids to learn about careers and the importance of education in opening up career opportunities. People often ask me what I do for Simpson Strong-Tie and I sometimes laugh about how my son Ryan responded to a questionnaire he filled out that day:
Q. What is your mom/dad's job?
A. Goes and gets coffee and sits at his desk
Q. What does your mom/dad actually do at work?
A. Walks in the test lab and checks things
When I am not checking things in the lab or sitting at my desk drinking coffee, I manage Engineering Research and Development for Simpson Strong-Tie, focusing on new product development for connectors and lateral systems.
I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and I am a licensed Civil and Structural Engineer in California. Prior to joining Simpson Strong-Tie, I worked for 10 years as a consulting structural engineer designing commercial, industrial, multi-family, mixed-use and retail projects. I was fortunate in those years to work at a great engineering firm that did a lot of everything. This allowed me to gain experience designing with wood, structural steel, concrete, concrete block and cold-formed steel as well as working on many seismic retrofits of historic unreinforced masonry buildings.
View all posts by Paul McEntee
I am having a problem subscribing to this blog and am not accepted. Let me know if I have joined. Thank you.
Hi Daniel – We’re working on this and will get back to you as soon as we have a solution for you. Thanks for your patience, and for your interest in the blog.
It looks like we were able to subscribe you to the blog. You should be receiving an email shortly with a link to verify that you
want to subscribe. Please let us know if you run into any issues. Thanks!
I think this is a great idea! I’ve always held Simpson in high esteem due to their progressiveness, and easy to use product catalogs. It makes the Structural Engineer’s life much more easy. (Especially in Florida).
I have become enamored with Simpson’s wood screws and use them whereever I can. If I retrofit a patio cover, I use custom design plate as gussets to tie posts to the colums and I specify SDS screws rather than bolts, as I would have done some
months ago. Thank you, especially for these screws.
Good job Paul on opening this Blog.
This is one awesome blog.
A
structural engineer is
a tough
work.
They
must ensure
that buildings
are
safe and steady,
and meant
to keep
the loads and function it was designed
for.
Dear Mr. Paul McEntee, Iam Balamurugan from South India. We are a pre engineered steel building manufacturing company ( FeNerve Building). We have one ongoing project of Mezzanine with steel deck. Its a constructed PEB building, we go for new mezzanine columns inside the building for the new mezzanine structure. The Existing floor concrete is a PCC, is it possible to go by anchoring techniques in that project ( the floor ht : 4″). Can u give a suggestion.
Regards,
Balamurugan Maruthupandian
I would love to share my views about structural engineering and its concepts. Being an engineer myself ,I am aware of the basic does and dont’s of engineering services.