Men of Steel
Our building is three and one-half stories high. The first, as we've established in the previous two posts, is made of concrete block and the giant poured concrete wall we spent all winter constructing. The next two and one-half stories are wood and steel frame. We need the steel frame because such a tall building weighs a lot and wood alone is not enough support.
The steel frame is a big, heavy collection of columns and beams (columns are vertical, beams are horizontal) that bolt or are welded together. Watching it go together reminded me of the "erector sets" many kids had when I was growing up. You can build almost anything if you have enough metal parts bolted together!
Just figuring out how to move the steel around was a challenge. The picture below shows the steel coming off the delivery truck but we had to rent a telescoping forklift to move it into position while setting it. Yours truly drove the forklift back to the rental center in a driving rain the next day! (fortunately no pics of that!)
A "boom" truck delivers our steel to the site.
It took about a day and a half to get all the pieces set. The columns have to be carefully placed on the concrete piers installed when the foundation was laid by Athens Excavating. Bolts in the concrete receive the holes in the columns "base plate".
A column is placed on its pier while Ron White adjusts the nuts above and below.
Once the columns are up then the horizontal beams are set in place and once the whole thing is bolted together it's ready to carry the load of the floors above. The building's center beam is 18" deep and over 24 feet long.
Connecting two of the beams running down the center of the structure.
Not everything goes according to plan though. Two of our columns came in a little long so the fabulous folks up at Logan Welding sent somebody right down to cut it to size. It's truly amazing to see how fast a cutting torch can go through structural steel. It takes less than a minute to cut the top off a column as seem in this picture,
Lonnie from Logan Welding takes "a little off the top".
Getting the steel set meant that we could get on to the business of framing the building in, the process of building walls, floors, window openings, rooms, stairs, etc. The steel work was interesting but everyone on the job really wanted to get down to working with wood. A few more steel pics follow.
Swinging a beam into position. The beam is tethered to the forklift with a heavy fabric strap.
The beam that will support the building right over Bella Vino's front door is put in place.
