The Building goes Vertical!

Perhaps the most dramatic change on the building site so far occured when our builders started putting the steel structure in place.  In a matter of a few days, the steel skeleton that will support our walls has taken shape.  Here you can see the structure towering over the nearby playground.

To put the frame up, the builders used a forklift-like machine (you can see it to the right in the picture above) to lift the individual beams to a vertical position. They then guide it onto four massive bolts projecting from the foundation. Once the bolts are through the holes in the base of the beam, it is secured with four bolts, and they move onto the next one.  Once several are up, they start attaching the crossbeams, which provide stability, and a place to later attach the walls of the building.  Here is a crew attaching the crossbeams to the structure:

Soon (but probably during Christmas Break) the builders will bring in a large crane to place the huge joists that will support the ceiling.  Watch this space for news and pictures when this happens!

The Steel Arrives

The steel pieces to build the frame of our building started arriving on campus today. 

The Builder will start fastening the beams into the floor soon, and then will bring in a crane to start placing the ceiling joists - perhaps before Christmas break.   They aren't sure what days their crew is taking off for Christmas, but there should be a lot of progress by the time school resumes in January.  While much of the building steel is in the field near the building, some of the joists are actually on the concrete pad we just poured. 




Here's a forklift with a handy extending arm (and more importantly with our mud, handy tractor wheels) moving some of the steel onto the pad.

More on Pouring Cement

Here are a few follow up items to the other day's post about pouring the cement floor.

• The actual name of the machine that leveled out the pile of cement into an even surface is called a Laser Screed.
• The layer of plastic between the gravel and the cement is there to keep moisture from coming up into the cement from the ground, and to keep the water in the cement from leaking out too quickly.
• The wire mesh reinforces the cement.  Once the cement is poured over the mesh, workers come by with a hooked pole and pull the wire up into the cement so that its actually in the middle of the cement when it dries.

The floor is now dry and solid, in fact we moved some of the steel roofing joists onto it today -- more on that soon. One last thing they did on the floor, though, was to cut grooves through the cement surface, like this:

You see these grooves in driveways, sidewalks, and other cement surfaces as well.  The reason they do this is that between temperature changes, small shifts in the earth and other factors, it's very likely there will be a crack in the cement some day.  When you have grooves in the cement, often the cracks will appear in the grooves, where you don't see them. If they appear somewhere else, they will stop when they get to a groove continue down the groove at that point (because it's the path of least resistance).

The Amazing Cement Hovercraft!

The machine you see here is called a Power Trowel. 

It glides along over the fresh cement on top of spinning blades that smooth out the cement surface. I nice smooth finish is important because the cement floor will be visible in the locker rooms and bathrooms (with a clear coat on top to make it look shiny).

When they're in use, they look like hovercraft, gliding over the cement.  I remarked how cool they looked to our builder and he said the five most beautiful words he could have in that circumstance:  "Do you want to try?"  YES!

Click here to see the video

Smoothing out the Cement... with Lasers!

Once the cement is poured, it has to be spread out evenly and smoothed out.  Since we're going to be laying a gym floor on the cement surface, it's very important the floor be perfectly even, with no high points or dips.  We used another machine that uses a laser to ensure the cement is even to within one eighth of an inch over the entire surface.  The machine works kind of like a squeegee with a long arm that stretches out over the pile of cement and a blade that is pulled back across the cement to spread it out.  To see the machine in action, check out the youtube video here:

Major Construction at 3am!

In my last post, I noted the challenge we had of getting the floor poured.  The rain has made it impossible to get the cement down, and has softened our access road, too.  With the steel scheduled to arrive later this week, we need the floor in place, so Accusteel decided yesterday to start putting in the cement at 3am this morning to give them time to get it done before the rain returned later this afternoon.

It was about 40 degrees out -- cold, but not too cold for cement -- when Troy Grady of Accusteel and his team showed up on the job.  The road was soft and a mess, but they used a bulldozer to fix it up and the first of what would be over 20 Sunrock cement trucks started showing up soon after.

(Note: The Sunrock Group is a third generation family business that started in Buffalo New York (which, incidently is where I started, too) and has operated in Raleigh for nearly 25 years.  They also did much of the concrete and gravel work on our original campus. )

Here's where more high-tech comes into play.  With the frame up around the floor, it's impossible to drive the trucks onto the gym surface to dump their cement. So how does the cement get there? They use an amazing machine called a cement pump.  This machine looks like a crane, but it's arm has a big hose that cement is pumped through.  From its location near the front of the gym, the pump can move its arm anywhere in the 14,000 square feet of the building to deposit cement.

Here's a photo of the cement pump with the arm rising high above the ground.  The closer the cement is being laid to where the cement pump is stationed, the higher the arm has to go.

As the cement trucks pull up, they dump their load into the back of the cement pump and it stores it until it gets pumped through the pipe.  As soon as the cement truck has emptied its load it drives back to the factory to get another load.  Over 200 cubic yards of concrete were put into the floor this morning!

All of this is pretty cool, but the coolest part is how the pump is operated.  You'd think the operator would be controlling the pump from some panel near the front of the machine. This would be a real problem, though, when you're trying to maneuver the pump to a particular location a hundred feet or more away.  Instead, the operator wears the controls on a belt that operates the pump by remote control.  A pair of joysticks can raise and lower the pump and move it in any direction. A button controls the flow of cement through the pipe.  Here's our operator, Ken, hard at work.                                                                                     

How cool is that!  A truck with a boom arm that reaches across half a football field and sprays cement, all controlled with a utility belt!  If Tonka made one of those, they'd sell a million of them for Christmas!

Preparing the Gym Floor

Note:  I'm adding several posts tonight that took place over the last week.

With the foundation laid, the Accu-Steel, our builder, starts preparing what will be the cement surface our gym floor goes on top of.  The dirt has already been graded, so now they have unloaded many truckloads of stone into the area.  Then a bulldozer spreads the stone around evenly on the pad.

Once the stone is spread around, it is covered over with a plastic sheet, and then a wire mesh is laid on top of it.  This is done to create an ideal bed for the concrete that will be poured on top of it.  Modern technology plays some surprising roles in this process.  For example, Accusteel uses a laser leveler to make sure the entire gym surface is completely level.  A rotating laser source is set up on a tripod in the middle of the floor, and equipment on the perimiter can use the laser beam to check to make sure the surface is level.

Once the surface is prepared,  the workmen construct a wooden frame around the entire perimeter of the gym.  This frame will hold the cement in until it dries, and then it will be removed. You can see the carpenters finishing the frame here:

With the frame in place, we're ready to pour the concrete floor.  Unfortunately, the weather isn't cooperating.  Pouring the floor will require 6-8 hours without rain and about freezing temperatures.  To complicate things, the heavy rain has made the dirt road to the side muddy. Cement trucks, when fully loaded, are incredbly heavy and there's a threat of them getting stuck in the mud (and stopping all the trucks behind them)  if its too soft.  Accusteel watches the weather carefully and considers how to firm up the road in preparation for pouring.

Pouring the foundation

Last week, we started pouring the cement foundation of the activities center.  The foundation will support the exterior wall and the steel frame of the building.  The cement is a couple feet deep to provide a strong base for the structure.

If you look at it, you'll see massive threaded steel rods sticking up from the cement in groups of four.  This is where the steel structure will be bolted down to the cement.

You may also notice that the foundation seems very wide.  The outside wall won't extend far past the steel structure, so when it's complete, there will be nearly a foot of foundation extending around the entire outside wall of the activities center.  We did this on purpose so that later this foundation can support a brick exterior we hope to apply to the building in a future phase.  For the moment, the brick exterior was an unnecessary cost to completing the building.  Also, we hope to add some additional rooms (like weight rooms and coach's offices) to the building in a later phase, and there's no sense in paying for a brick exterior that we'll be covering up with additional construction later. 

When we first open the gym this spring, it will be a metal shell, but later as our full campus emerges, it will have a brick exterior for a classic look that is consistent with the other buildings.

Planning Ahead and Laying Conduit

As we get ready to pour the floor of the activities center, we needed to plan ahead and think about where we might need to run wires around the building.  What if we needed to run a wire from the scorers table to control the scoreboard? What about running microphones? Where would we need internet connections?

The building committee brainstormed over all these questions with the builder and our audio/video contractor to develop a list of our needs.  Then we buried conduit (plastic pipes) throughout the site so when we need to run a wire somewhere, we can simply feed it through our buried pipes.  Once the cement sub-floor has been poured, these pipes will be hidden, except for small stubs emerging from the floor.  We may not even use some of the conduit we buried, but it's inexpensive insurance for some time in the future when we need to get a wire from one side of the building to the other.