Construction Commonalities

In Tuesday's lab we talked about commonalities in construction, and our assignment was to visit two construction sites on campus (New Residence Hall and Basketball Practice Facility) and to take note of commonalities and differences between the two sites. We discussed that commonalities in construciton sites all revolve around the same broad topics of equipment, site layout utilization, mock panels, material handling, materials, state of completion, temporary structures, and labor.

Both sites were doing touch up and finalizing work as they were in the final phases of construction, with the Basketball Facility being a little closer to completion than the new dorm. Other similarities include that both sites had heavy equipment stored and in use on site, and that storage was obviously a very important issue. With the construction going on the same time as school, the workspaces are very restriced on both sites and therefore both sites had multiple trailers and other storage units on site. The sites both used much of the same materials, such as hokie stone, which was still being completed on the Residence Hall, and precast concrete. Both projects also were fenced off and blocked in the same manner. They also both had mock-wall examples on display.

Differences are that the New Residence Hall work area was too small for much parking, and workers therefore must find alternate places to park then to get to the work area. Also due to the varying sizes of the work areas, the New Residence Hall was much more cluttered and hard to get materials organized, while the Basketball Facility seemed much more open and accessible. Another difference is that the Residence Hall had many more visible workers, which could just be because there is more work to do outside because the project is farther from completion than the Basketball Facility.

Industry Day-March 17th

Tuesday's class was cancelled so we could go check out industry day. AWESOME. I saw a lot of cool stuff and learned some even cooler stuff, and even signed up for a field trip to the BMW factory sometime in April. Exciting day for sure.

My first stop of the day was the Mobile Crane. The operator and materials were from Kiewit, and they put on a demonstration for us. They enlisted a student to help direct the operator, and taught us the correct signals to use. A chart of signals (shown below-a little blurry, i know) is also painted directly onto the crane itself.

The demonstration was placing a ceiling section with HVAC onto a wall section.

In somewhere around 5-10 minutes that ceiling was successfully placed and proceeded to be shored up by someone drilling holes and connecting it to the wooden planks at the corners. The almost finished product is shown below.
Next I went to check out a cement truck from Chandler Inc. A driver named Ricky talked to us about it and told us that it was a brand new Green truck which cost $160,000. A pretty penny huh? $12,000 of this was for a special exhaust stack which constantly cleans itself and releases literally NO exhaust. Ever.
Cool right? Ricky also told us that Chandler has 100s of trucks in total. Here is a picture of the entire truck.
The third stop was to see cutting edge surveying equipment from American Infrastructure. They had some really cool equipment and explained to us how it worked. The equipment can be transferred through gps directly to a bulldozer operator and tell him exactly what to do. The level of precision with these tools is amazing. This equipment made the entire process automated, and has made the traditional method of staking and taking points almost entirely obsolete. The actual computer models and drawings of projects can also be loaded directly onto the screen with the equipment, which is shown below.
The next stop was the crane simulator. While I didn't get the joy to operate it myself I did witness a few classmates and could definitely see the benefits (and fun) of having one of these. Walter (will be introduced at the next stop) mentioned how these simulators aren't just for fun, that the actualy operators are trained on them before starting the job. He said that the actual job they will be doing can be programmed onto the simulator and they can essentially do a practice run of what they will be doing on site. This has obvious benefits such as saving time that would be wasted looking at plans and figuring out approaches, and also greatly decreasing the odds that a mistake will be made. Like the surveying equipment, the drawings and models can be directly loaded onto a screen and integrated into the simulator. Below are a few pictures of the images that are utilized on the screen, and of the simulator itself.
My final stop was checking out the motor grader which was also from American Infrastructure. Walter was here to talk to us about it and really gave a lot of good info (as cited in the previous paragraph). He was a civil engineer at Virginia Tech and loved the place so much he decided to hang around and get his masters in construction from the Myers-Lawson School of Construction. Like most of the technology we saw, the grader was equipped with gps which allowed the soil to be moved in accordance to the gps within a hundreth of an inch from the correct location. Pretty amazing stuff in my opinion. What really amazes me is the fact that they snuck this gigantic piece of equipment in and parked it practically next to us without any of us even noticing. I still have no idea when or how this happened, but oh well, at least we got to see it. Below is a picture of the motor grader.
This pretty much wraps up my day, a very informative and actually pretty darn fun day. I look forward to more classes being like this now that the weather is so nice! Hook us up Mr. Mills ;)

Sketches

This is a view from the front of the HVAC system on the 3rd floor of Bishop Favreau. You can see the steel beam framed by a steel girder at the top of the drawing off of the ceiling. Metal rods are attached to hold the drip pan shown at the bottom. A sprinkler system is shown on the right with duct pipes also visible.


These two sketches are of the stairway in Bishop Favreau. There are plan, section, scale, and landing views of the stairs. They are concrete-threaded and steel with a steel pan and steel channel. As shown the threads are in a 'Z' shape.
This is a floor plan and window and door section of my dorm room. Obviously dorm room's are boring and there isn't much to them. The walls are simply CMU, and the cabinets and sink are built into the wall and are connected to the room adjacent on the right. The window is a simple double-hung window with a large sill at the bottom and the doorway is framed with steel framing.

This is a mock-up wall outside of Bishop-Favreau. Unfortunately I could not get this to flip the correct way once it was inserted into the blog. I can assure you, however, that it is masterfully sketched ;). It rests on concrete foundation, and has a CMU wall on one side with hokie stone on the other. There is a cast stone sill on top of the panels. There is also a water proofing membrane shown.

Site Visit-New Residence Hall

Workers were grouting and inspecting the hokie stone on the exterior of the building. The entire building is surrounded by hokiestone, and the workers worked independently and moved from the left to the right as they worked.

A forklift was used to bring down the dumpsters filled with trash from the upper level. This method saves multiple trips as opposed to workers simply carrying the trash, and eliminates the hazard of workers throwing their trash to the ground.

A fence was damaged sometime during the construction, and needed to be replaced. A new order of fencing was on site to replace the old, and was used to fill about a 40 foot area of damaged wire fencing. Caution tape was placed around the area for safety purposes to keep pedestrians out of the job site.

Before the hokie stone is put in place on the wall, the back and 4 sides must be squared in order to make the stone fit together. These workers are using a chisel and wet-saw to shape these stones. The chisel worker finished roughly 8 blocks in the 45 or so minutes I was at the site.

The project manager is inspecting the work on all levels of the scaffolding, starting with the cleanup (seen here) on the top floor where the hokie stone had just been finished.

Estimating Screenshots from Excel

Welcome to a compilation of things that you cant read even when you squint.

Unit Cost


Assembly Cost



I had much more difficulty finding the items for the Unit cost in constrast to the Assembly cost. The Assembly required much more math, whereas the Unit required much more knowledge of the actual materials than did the Assembly. Conceptual estimating is much easier than detailed estimating because conceptual estimating is a much broader estimate while detailed estimating is attempting to find an exact price, much more accurate tan conceptual estimating.

Guess What Else? Wall Assembly

I found this super cool wall assembly photo. Nice right? The materials used include: Wall Planks, landscape fabric, gravel, hangers, and a big sand footing. Probably easy to see for yourself seeing as how it is kindly written on the picture for you.

Here's a link: http://www.rd.com/images/tfhimport/2000/Sep00_Retaining_Wall/20000901_Retaining_Wall_page004img002_size2.jpg

Guess what?

I attended class today. Nice.