I am a sole proprietor.
I would be flattered to be called a businessman.
My brother is a former accountant and a businessman in the truest sense of the word. And he has a take on this that I find convincing.
He says that I do not really have a "business" even though I am legally...
Given that we're talking about less than 500 lbs in a highly redundant light frame system, what do you feel is the probability of a dangerous collapse here. What's your version of my 1:50,000?
What are some examples from your own work where contractors have suffered significant financial...
Ugh... still with this downvoting stuff.
Nowadays, I get the sense that there's some cowardly chickenshit following me around ET downvoting me every time that I share a frank opinion or experience.
Dear Cowardly Chickenshit: if you've got something to say, just say it. Peak out from behind...
Rephrased more optimistically: allow them to avoid suffering undue reputational damage as a result of having made an error that an experienced structural engineer will recognize as having no meaningful consequences.
I've no doubt that it does occasionally result in a compounding effect of more...
I do not feel that it empowers clients to do shoddy work in any meaningful sense. Rather, I accept that everyone makes mistakes and I only approve errors that I feel deserve to be approved based on technical merit which is, often, just my technical judgment.
This mitigates business risk for my...
I doubt this actually needs saying but I'll say it anyhow for the sake of completeness.
I won't take any risk, no matter how small, if it is not balanced by some manner of reward.
That reward might be money. That reward might be influence. That reward might just be a good dopamine hit. But...
Exactly that. I would argue that the ASCE guidance on load testing also has a fair bit of "arbitrary" built into it.
Guides like that are put together mostly by committees of other engineer using their judgments. Do those guys and gals have better judgment than I do? Surely. Does a...
...younger that I glossed over this entirely. I didn't see it until later in my career when my responsibilities grew and the potential for frustration increased. In this respect, I'd almost entertain turning Mrs. KootK into someone with *shudder* a humanities degree??? That's probably going...
Dude, we are so meeting up for beer / coffee. I can even provide ET references to attest to my being a decent person to spend an hour with. I've had the privilege of breaking bread with both @jayrod12 and @BAretired. Contrary to what you might suspect, I won't just argue with you about stuff...
Yesir. Born in Trail (not on one). Grew up in Cranbrook. Now residing in Calgary, the Gotham City-esque metropolis to which my family would travel for new school clothing each Labour Day weekend. My dad was kinda flaky in his youth so we moved around a lot.
A sketch of the situation would be helpful.
I can't see welding strengthening a column in any way that I'd want to rely upon.
If you're welding to a column that will be carrying load during the welding, that warrants some consideration.
Are we talking about single shear tab connections...
In the context of a new build like this, I would never do a load test unless I was 99.5% sure of it passing. Here, I'm 99.999995% sure of it passing. I would literally be willing to place my head in a guillotine and watch the test be performed with the consequence of failure being my demise...
It's annoying how fragile our food supply is. Particularly the healthy stuff. Mrs. KootK is a US citizen. I'm banking on her being able to go down to Montana and negotiate me some peanuts and grapefruits.
I had the same question and was mocked mercilessly for asking it. Isn't that a lot of shelving real-estate for 32 cans??
The shelves have grippy liners that get adhered into place to protect the painted particle board. The four corner cans are just to keep the corners from peeling up while the...
You should be fine with both options. Galvanizing is nowhere near as sensitive to localized removal as you are imagining. Zinc, even some distance from the exposed substrate, will still offer galvanic protection to that substrate. This is precisely why galvanized rebar is often preferred over...
For my EOR estimates, I just use RISA etc and limit myself to #2 SPF for the chords. The #2 SPF tends to keep the designs from being overly aggressive such that plating issues are pretty much non-existent for 2X trusses. This is a good way to keep yourself from doing silly EOR stuff with the...
No, I'm not sure that I want it known that I was there. I just urinated on the side of the chimney to ward of other structural engineers. That, and I've got a wicked addiction to Big Gulps that flares up whenever I have to drive somewhere for work.
The eccentricity associated with supported load delivery usually isn't much. As such, one can often make the argument that the "torsion" is really just eccentric shear. The danger in moment connecting the slab elements, I feel, is in inadvertently creating much greater eccentricity and...
