A Reason to Celebrate

All of the parts - steel beam extension and bolts to tie it in, and the tap-tights to fasten the two 33 ft beams together to make a 66 ft beam - arrived last Thursday with no further instructions on how it was to go together.  And as of today (it's Tuesday), ALL OF THE STEEL ARCHES AND BEAMS ARE ASSEMBLED! 

The attaching of the extension to the beam was probably the trickiest part.  Bill took that on.  He was up on scaffolding, with the beam and arches that were already assembled.  The beam being a box beam and each arch being a piece of metal to attach to the box.  So ordinarily, the 2 bolts need to go thru 4 pieces of metal, holding both arches together with the box beam in the middle.  With the extension, he had to unbolt the bolts and add two pieces of metal that were welded on the outside of the beam extension, inserting them between the box beam and each arch.  Six pieces of metal with each set of two bolt holes had to be aligned. He got the first bolt in which took some doing.  Then the second bolt needed a different tack. One of the tools he used was a big pipe wrench and he ground one of the bolts so that it was slightly pointed (bevelled the end of one of the bolts so that it would slip through the slightly misaligned metal).  He applied the 36" pipe wrench to move the arch where it needed to be and tapped the bolt with the bevelled end while holding everything in place, and it went in!

There are steel 2nd floor supports that still have to be added to the structure. 

We have had some more rain, and needed to re-compact the soil around the slab of the house.  

The erection of the steel was done by hand except for the 40 x 66 part of the house.  Here are some videos that show the process of attaching each arch to the main beam.   The team got it down to about 15 minutes per arch.

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