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.

Questions Answered: Making Wood Connections Work for Two-Hour Fire Walls

In this post, Paul McEntee follows up on our July 25 webinar, Making Wood Connections Work for Two-Hour Fire Walls, by answering some of the interesting questions raised by attendees.

We presented an hour-long webinar recently about using fire wall hangers in Type III wood-frame buildings, how they are tested and what the code requirements are for these buildings. In case you weren’t able to join our discussion, you can watch the on-demand webinar and earn PDH and CEU credits here.
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Webinar: Making Wood Connections Work for Two-Hour Fire Walls

My wife made furniture shopping a family event last weekend, which meant I had to go. The showroom was in a concrete tilt-up with open-web steel joists and a wood roof. My oldest son asked me who decides what construction materials are used, and why. He’s starting college in the fall and thinks he wants to be a mechanical engineer, but his curiosity about construction gives me hope that we can convert him.
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Good Ideas Come from Many Places — “Necessity Is the Mother of Invention”

You never know where the next great product idea or innovation is going to come from — some of our best new ideas originate with the customers who use our current products. At Simpson Strong-Tie, we welcome any inspiration that can help us serve our customers’ needs even better. With so much competition, however, and because so much research and testing are entailed in developing each new product, the criteria that an idea must meet to gain eventual acceptance are necessarily quite rigorous. In this post, Steve Rotzin, Manager of Intellectual Property and Legal Services at Simpson Strong-Tie, outlines some of these criteria for your consideration.

All of us, at one time or another, dream up a product idea of some sort. My wife was once sanding the tongue-and-groove boards of our living room ceiling and she thought of a very cool idea of gloves that had Velcro on them and users could interchange sandpaper of various grit on any finger of the glove. If you’ve ever sanded anything, this actually made a lot of sense especially for complex shapes and tough to reach spots. I researched it and found out that someone had already thought of it and “patented it.”
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What You Should Know About the New DGH Fire Wall Hanger Options

Does everyone do year-end performance reviews to discuss how you did on your project objectives and professional development goals? I love meeting with my team to recap all their amazing accomplishments for the past year, discussing long-term career plans and figuring out the steps we will take to implement those plans over the next six months, year, and beyond. I hate, hate, hate, hate doing all the paperwork that HR requires – but I am done with it now, so I’ll get over it.

One of our new product objectives for 2017 was to create a new fire wall hanger that could be installed before the drywall. Creating a joist hanger that can span a gap while still meeting the target loads was a challenging task. We released the DG series of fire wall hangers in July. I discussed the use of fire wall hangers in Why Fire-Rated Hangers Are Required in Type III Wood-Frame Buildings.
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How Computer Simulation Can Power Innovation

This week’s post was written by Frank Ding, Engineering Analysis & Technical Computing Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie. 

Computer-simulated product testing is being used increasingly in modern engineering and manufacturing because it provides a low-risk, time- and cost-efficient means of modeling system performance using a wide array of variables before a physical prototype has been created. The following Blog post outlines some of the uses and advantages of integrating this technology into the product development process.

The role of test simulation in product design might not be the general focus of the Structural Engineering Blog. However, you may have noticed that computer simulation plots have been cited in a few previous postings. Nowadays, it’s rare to talk about product development without mentioning computer simulation at some point. The aim of this post is to give you a better sense of how test simulation can benefit product development and innovation.
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Simplify Access to Your Drawings with the Simpson Strong-Tie AutoCAD® Plugin

This week’s post was written by Carolyn O’Hearn, Software and App Marketing Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie.

Accessing engineering drawings, determining whether you have the right ones and loading them into AutoCAD can seem like an exhausting endeavor. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an application that does everything you need in one package? An application that will also save you time, on both retrieval and installation, and give you access to additional applications? Simpson Strong-Tie has developed a new tool that can take care of all these needs.
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Turkeys and Gratitude

This week’s post was written by Kari Martin, Marketing Communications Content Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie. 

There are a couple of turkeys that like to hang out around our home office in Pleasanton and, no, I’m not referring to any of my colleagues — we actually have a gang of wild turkeys that comes up from the creek behind the office. Almost every day, these colorful birds feel safe enough to stroll onto the office walkway pecking for food outside our office windows and doors. It’s surprising to me that these beautiful creatures could be so fearless (or is it simply naïve?), especially around Thanksgiving time. Their presence reminds me that being fearless is important, because nothing new would ever be discovered if we were too afraid to venture outside our comfort zones.

The beauty and strangeness of the turkeys also remind me to be thankful, because everything we have in life is ultimately a gift. Their consistent return to our office is a gentle reminder as I walk into work to give thanks to you, our readers, our customers and our partners every day. Thank you!

We hope you enjoy the holiday with your family and friends. We’ll be back with another post next week.

A New Way to See Whether FRP Is Right for Your Project

This week’s post was written by Griff Shapack, FRP Design Engineer at Simpson Strong-Tie. 

Specifying our Composite Strengthening Systems™ (CSS) is unlike choosing any other product we offer. In light of the unique variables involved with selecting and using fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) solutions, we encourage you to leverage our expertise to help with your FRP strengthening designs. To get started, we first need to determine whether FRP is right for your project. The fastest way to do that is for you to fill out our Design Questionnaire. Our new Excel-based questionnaire collects your project information and helps you use the existing capacity check to evaluate whether or not FRP is suitable for your project per the requirements of ACI 562-16 Section 5.5.2. After the feasibility study, the questionnaire creates input sheets specifically for your project.
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Beat Building Drift with the New DSSCB Drift Strut Slide Connector from Simpson Strong-Tie

This week’s post was written by Clifton Melcher, Senior Product Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie.

Structural engineers concerned with building envelopes are always looking for better solutions that help isolate the cladding from the primary structure in conditions where large building drift is a concern. Simpson Strong-Tie has an answer with a unique and innovative solution, the new DSSCB (drift strut sliding clip bypass).
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Drop, Cover, and Hold On – Becoming Earthquake-Smart in the 2017 Great ShakeOut

This week’s post was written by Jacob McAuley, Associate Regional Marketing Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie.

Every October, millions of people across the globe participate in earthquake drills as part of an event called the Great ShakeOut in order to improve their earthquake preparedness. This year, the Great ShakeOut took place on October 19 and involved more than 60 countries. In addition to the earthquake drill, participants in the event often take part in other activities such as seminars, Q&As and more. At Simpson Strong-Tie, we practiced earthquake drills at each of our major branches, and, in our Pacific Northwest region, we were part of a Reddit Ask Me Anything event (an online live Q&A) to talk about earthquake safety and answer people’s questions. Below, I discuss our participation in both of these activities.
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