Entries Tagged 'site life' ↓

Drove out to site this morning, as I will be doing every morning for the next month to despatch concrete units… Ah bugger it, this blog is going to be in point form tonight. CBF.

• Arrived.
• Got a call saying the crane driver slept in.
• Trucks started arriving and had to wait until another crane arrived (~1 hour).
• Yard became a truck carpark.
• Crane came.
• Loaded some units.
• Truck drivers had to return to depot to pick up other trailers.
• Sat there with 2 riggers and a crane, waiting for about 2 hours.
• Other trailers came.
• Loaded more units.
• I sent crane and riggers home.
• Another trailer arrives. WTF? But I just sent the crane off…
• Misunderstanding of arrangements for the day (this time my fault)
• Drive back to work for a performance meeting (ok).
• Feel crap for the rest of the day.
• CBF tweeting, can barely BF blogging.
• Going to watch an episode of MacGyver or maybe an episode of Coupling now.

I don’t mind people stuffing up sometimes, everyone does it and I’m usually very lenient unless we’re waiting around for hours on end while paying for labour and/or machinery. Despite the events of today, I don’t have any dramas with either company. But what’s worse is when you stuff up yourself. I hate stuffing someone else around because I don’t like to be stuffed around. I rang up that company and apologised, but still felt like shit for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow is a new day.

More work screw ups (these ones not mine).

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I managed to score a site visit this week which meant, thankfully, I wouldn’t have to go into the office. I had to “supervise” the despatch of some concrete precast units out of our old yard. There’s been no one there for a couple of months while we wait for news that we can transport some more “grey gold” out.

It was a logistical nightmare! Nah not really, but I had to arrange for a crane, two riggers and two different transport companies to arrive that morning so we can load and despatch the units. I arranged it to happen on Monday and looked forward to wearing my long sleeve high viz PPE and site gear (for a change).

We had our yard set up on some spare land in a quarry, so there were other operations happening nearby. I was there for about a year before I moved into the office a couple of months ago, so it was nice to be able to get back there every now and then and catch up with the supervisors from other companies that own the place who I’d befriended while working there.

But wouldn’t you just know it. It hails on Monday. It rains heavily on Monday. It is VERY windy on Monday. And I’m working outside all morning. To top it off, one of the transport companies stuffed up and thought they were supposed to come out on Tuesday (and tried to make it out like it was my fault). It wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t really care for 2 reasons.

1. It was very windy so we probably wouldn’t have lifted the 40+ tonne units anyways, and
2. It meant I could be out of office again for a second day.

So you could say I was a winner AND a loser those two days.

You’re a winner when you get to go out of the office on site for a day (or two)… and a loser when that day is one of the few days it HAILED and rained and gusted and roared (simultaneously) this winter.

You’re a winner when you finish early on site and go chat to the chick on the weighbridge for an hour to avoid going back to the office… and a loser when she tells you she used to think you were gay (but that it doesn’t matter if you are or not)

*slaps palm on head*

WTF?! And she couldn’t even tell me WHY she used to think I was gay. Probably cause I wasn’t much interested in cars and boats and booze and cigarettes. But seriously… WTF?!!

Dilbert 2.0 - 20 Years of Dilbert

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This article from this month’s Engineers Australia magazine is by a young design engineer who talks about the importance of site visits for inexperienced designers. Visiting a construction site where your design is being constructed can be a steep learning experience.

The biggest point he alluded to is constructability of the design. By that I mean that whatever you design needs to be able to be built. If it’s too complicated or fiddly or downright impossible, you may experience some of that “slightly more descriptive” language that was mentioned. But don’t take offence at that (that’s just how they are) – use it as a learning experience.

I’ve experienced the particular example given where a reinforcement steel fixer complains that they are unable to construct a unit as it is shown in the drawing. There are a few things structural designers need to consider when designing reinforced concrete / precast units (for reinforcement in particular).

• N32+ size rebars are very heavy to carry. If you have a concrete unit say 18m long and this bar is to go on the top of a 1.5m high wall, you might need 5 steelfixers to carry it and hold it in position while it is being tied. If there is the possibility of using more of a smaller size bar, do it, purely for manual handling reasons. Obviously if it doesn’t give you the required capacity you can’t, but at least consider it.
• Reinforcement does not come bent at a sharp 90 degrees like it is drawn on the design drawings. When it is made, reinforcement is bent around a pin so it has a radius – there is a curvature. If you have double layer reinforcement in a unit, this could make things very unpleasant for the steelfixer.
• You can’t have 2 x 90 degree bends in close proximity to each other. In practice, as mentioned above, this is made into a U-bar around a pin to suit. So when you are dealing with pull-out bars that have to be flush with the face of the concrete, it might not always be that easy.
• Don’t have too much reinforcement in one location! You have to realise that when the concrete is poured, it has to go between and bond with the reinforcement. If it’s designed such that you have a wall of reinforcement, well it’s just not going to do what it is supposed to.

Why Construction Workers Should Wear Long Sleeve PPE

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