With all of the frenzy that happens before (and during) the holidays, I won’t be doing full blog posts this or next week. But, I did want to remind you that this Thursday (12/20) is the last day to enter our “Creative Uses of Our Product” contest. We’ll post our five winners to the blog next week.
This week will be a short snapshot into what we were doing yesterday. We are always testing products and usually the only people who stop by to watch the tests besides the lab technicians are an R&D engineer and occasionally the product manager. As valuable as testing is, the simple day-to-day stuff just doesn’t generate much excitement – crushing bowling balls is fun and gets a crowd, but we save that for orientation classes.
When I had more hair and less of it was gray, I worked on a project as an assistant engineer doing the calculations for a mixed-use building in San Jose, California. Final design consisted of four stories of wood framing over a concrete podium slab and another level of below-grade parking. At that time, my firm had designed many two- and three-story residential buildings, but common thinking was you switched to steel or concrete for taller structures because of perceived limitations in wood-framed construction.Continue Reading
In my previous life as a building designer, I occasionally saw some creative installations of Simpson Strong-Tie products. These usually came in the form of an RFI where the contractor was asking for forgiveness for a misinstallation. However, this week’s post pays tribute to the creativity and ingenuity of our customers. The following photos are some of my favorite interesting applications and creative uses of our products. Some are purely utilitarian, which describes most of the aftermarket automotive uses. Others have a unique beauty while solving a problem or filling a need. Some are truly works of art and the rest are just plain silly. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Tell us which picture is your favorite by posting a comment, or tell us about an interesting application or creative use for Simpson Strong-Tie products you’ve seen. We’ll be awarding five commenters with a Simpson Strong-Tie Prize Pack via random drawing (one entry per person, please). Details and rules here.
In my previous life as a building designer, I occasionally saw some creative installations of Simpson Strong-Tie products. These usually came in the form of an RFI where the contractor was asking for forgiveness for a misinstallation. However, this week’s post pays tribute to the creativity and ingenuity of our customers. The following photos are some of my favorite interesting applications and creative uses of our products. Some are purely utilitarian, which describes most of the aftermarket automotive uses. Others have a unique beauty while solving a problem or filling a need. Some are truly works of art and the rest are just plain silly. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Tell us which picture is your favorite by posting a comment, or tell us about an interesting application or creative use for Simpson Strong-Tie products you’ve seen. We’ll be awarding five commenters with a Simpson Strong-Tie Prize Pack via random drawing (one entry per person, please). Details and rules here.
I tend to think of designers as dealing with either wind or seismic design, yet the Southeast region contains everything that Mother Nature can throw at a building. This includes high seismic areas along the New Madrid and Charleston faults, hurricanes along the Gulf and Eastern coast, and tornado prone areas throughout the South and Midwest. Sam participated in the investigation and was a co-author of the Damage Study and Future Direction for Structural Design Following the Tuscaloosa Tornado of 2011, which gives him some very recent experience with tornado damage. This week, Sam will be discussing a topic not often thought about by structural engineers – the importance of proper roof tile attachments. Here is Sam’s post:
According to recent studies by the Insurance Institute for Business Home and Safety (IBHS), roof coverings are a major problem area in wind-related events and account for 95% plus of home claims after the event.
Preventing roof tiles from becoming wind-borne debris in high wind regions is essential for several reasons, and may also have an effect on insurance premiums. In this post, I’d like to discuss two reasons that roof tiles can pose a significant threat to life safety:
Hello – I’m currently on vacation for the holiday, so will not be posting an entry to the blog this week (except to tell you that I’m not posting to the blog this week.) Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about the blog coming soon!
This is Part 1A of a four-part series I’ll be doing on how connectors, fasteners, anchors and cold-formed steel systems are load rated. I envisioned doing a four-part series on how connectors, fasteners, anchors, and cold-formed steel are load rated. After writing the first installment on connectors, I realized that connectors are a bit more complicated, since the testing and evaluation for joist hangers (or similar devices) is different than testing for holdown devices. And I wanted to discuss holdowns. So without belaboring the apology for my numbering system, this will be part 1A of the series – still discussing wood connectors, but focusing on holdowns and some of the unique requirements in their load rating. AC155, Acceptance Criteria for Hold-Downs (Tie-Downs) Attached to Wood Members, was first developed in 2005 to better address boundary conditions, deflection limits, and wood post limits. Prior to AC155, holdowns were evaluated based on testing on a steel jig with a safety factor of 3.0 and an NDS bolt calculation. Deflection at the allowable load was simply reported so that it was available for use in design, but there was not a deflection limit that affected the load rating. Bolted Holdown – Steel Jig Test In the steel jig setup shown, the jig keeps the holdowns stationary while the rectangular bar underneath the holdowns is pushed downward to simulate an uplift force. This was (and still is) an effective method of testing the capacity of the steel body of a holdown, but it does not tell you a lot about the deflection of the holdown when installed on a wood member. Since story-drift is such a critical component to shearwall performance and the deflection of holdowns has a significant effect on the total drift, this needed to be address in the holdown test standard. Continue Reading
This is Part 1A of a four-part series I’ll be doing on how connectors, fasteners, anchors and cold-formed steel systems are load rated.
I envisioned doing a four-part series on how connectors, fasteners, anchors, and cold-formed steel are load rated. After writing the first installment on connectors, I realized that connectors are a bit more complicated, since the testing and evaluation for joist hangers (or similar devices) is different than testing for holdown devices. And I wanted to discuss holdowns. So without belaboring the apology for my numbering system, this will be part 1A of the series – still discussing wood connectors, but focusing on holdowns and some of the unique requirements in their load rating.Continue Reading
While the Simpson Strong-Tie Tye Gilb R&D lab in Stockton is a large testing facility, the world’s largest R&D lab is Mother Nature herself. Natural disasters such as earthquakes or storms put our engineering designs to the test. In this week’s blog post, I’ll be turning attention to wall anchorage for out-of-plane forces and the lessons we have learned from Mother Nature so far.
The 1979 building code incorporated many of the lessons learned from the 1971 San Fernando earthquake. In 1994, Mother Nature put the 1979 building code to the test with the January 17 Northridge earthquake. The Northridge earthquake showed that some of the increased design and detailing requirements in the 1979 building code worked well to improve performance over what was observed in 1971. However, it also revealed to researchers that acceleration at the roof level of single story warehouse buildings were three to four times the ground acceleration. The combination of higher than expected acceleration and excessive deformation of the wall anchorage assembly caused many wall anchorage failures.
Figure 1 Out-of-Plane Wall Anchorage Assembly
Several changes in the design forces used for wall anchorage and additional detailing requirements were incorporated in the 1997 Uniform Building Code. The requirements have been refined with each new building code, but overall the requirements and design forces have remained about the same under the current International Building Code. Wall anchorage design is governed by ASCE 7-05 and ASCE 7-10 Section 12.11. These provisions aim to mitigate the brittle wall anchorage failures observed in past earthquakes by increasing the design force and in Seismic Design Categories C through F, requiring:Continue Reading
A few months ago, the Today Show asked Simpson Strong-Tie to demonstrate a deck collapse to educate the public about deck safety. Often through the Fall and Winter months, decks go unused yet see a lot of activity from rain, sleet and snow. When the sun comes out in the Spring, people get out on their decks again without much thought about how the elements may have affected the important connections on their deck. In addition to the weather, there are other factors to consider about deck safety:
Experts agree that the average life expectancy of a wood deck is 10 to 15 years.
It’s estimated that there are millions of decks in the U.S. that are beyond their useful life and may be unsafe.
The number of deck collapses has increased in recent years.
Within the past five years, 651 injuries and four deaths have occurred due to deck collapse.
So, I’m thinking about deck safety. I thought I’d share with you the “5 Warning Signs of an Unsafe Deck” we discussed on the Today Show: Continue Reading
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