Jim Amrhein's book is a leader in the concepts of masonry design, but some of his concepts were not included due to several reasons. It is heavily influenced by the west coast seismic concepts (he worked for a California group/association) of the era that are not practical in other areas, but the engineering is sound.
Some of his concepts were "don't count on what you cannot see", "don't arbitrarily fill all cores since it provides little additional strength, but changes the properties of the structure away from the design assumptions".
There will be no new version since Jim has passed away.
Keep in mind that any mention to codes are very fluid since codes can change at any time or at any location. The requirements can easily be altered based on good engineering.
An additional resource is the National Concrete Masonry Association (NCMA) at ncma.org. The have many available testing program results, resources including over 100 TEK Notes on all subjects. Just go to the web site and sign in using a location and any producer name to gain access. All of the technical documents are prpared by the engineering staff that is active in all masonry groups plus TMS, ASTM, ACI, and the building codes. The also have a very substantial laboratory that does confidential testing for the government, private companies and general industry testing to document the TEK Notes. Some of the results are confidential, but the staff has been exposed to a great deal of additional general knowledge.
Dick
Engineer and international traveler interested in construction techniques, problems and proper design.
