This design by committee, with so few of the real facts and details in hand, seems incredibly dangerous. Who undersized these beams and slabs during the prelim. design phase and who did the plan we finally saw? They should be answering his questions. And, he should be man enough to ask them how to do the impossible, when he isn’t ever sure how to do the possible and isn’t absorbing your suggestions. Since no one else has asked yet, (with the exception of hokie66 on 24SEPT, in slightly different words) I will ask; are we being helpful here or just encouraging malpractice? I’m all for helping young engineers become better engineers, but they’ve got to have a good grasp of the basic subject concepts to progress. And, we shouldn’t be encouraging non-engineers who try to practice real structural engineering, on significant structures, just because they have a structural analysis program that they don’t fully understand.
RLC32681: When you ask a question you have to give enough info. so you stand a half a chance of getting some intelligent advice which pertains to the problem at hand. You got some good gut feeling and rule of thumb advice given what the others had to go on, but it seemed to go right over your head for the most part. You need and engineering education, and if you have that already, then you certainly need a real mentor, not our encouragement. I don’t know if you are working in a consulting engineer’s office, or what, but knowing a couple guys who have structural engineer printed on their business cards isn’t what you need. You need a real practicing engineer, who knows the local codes and construction industry, and who signs and seals construction documents and is licenced. He should be looking over your shoulder and answering your questions in real time and giving you some direction. You should be able to look at the plans together so he can point out what he is talking about, and/or draw you a thumb-nail sketch of what he means and wants. He can point you to appropriate text books and other reading, etc. Without this kind of guidance, you should not be doing the conc. design engineering on this job, you could end up behind the eight-ball on a project this size. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, without a good mentor, that won’t help your development. A good mentor, and/or working under a qualified engineer will give you the guidance and experience you need to advance properly.
That’s how I see this thread, irrespective if the final column size or slab depth. We are not furthering the engineering profession by participating in a charade like this.
