Can anyone give me a source (preferably online) of building material weights? My situation right now is we’re framing 2″x6″x10′ walls 16″ oc with 7/16 osb sheathing and I want to decide how long a wall me and co-worker can tilt up at a time. I don’t frame a lot so it’s always a wild a$$ guess. Thanks guys.
Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
From building boxes and fitting face frames to installing doors and drawers, these techniques could be used for lots of cabinet projects.
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Replies
depends..got windows? KD lumber? All headers or a NLB wall? recent hemmoroids? Mexican food last night?
Those are what decides how much yall can lift.
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
I don't have the plans in front of me but I'll do my best. 2 walls are identical 2"x6"x~10'x~18' 1 window in each ~6'0"x5'6"RO triple 2"x10" headers. I'll install windows after wall is up. The other wall is 2"x6"x10'x27'. No window,door,wall pocket, or anything else. All walls will be 16"OC with single bottom plate double top plate.
I'm 50 years old, heavy smoker, problem back, sore muscle behind left shoulder blade, my hemmoroids haven't bothered me in years, my high cholesteral is responding to medication, I wear reading glasses, I have hemochromatosis and I type with one finger.
My co-worker is gay.
With this info can you give me a source for weight of building materials?(grin).
Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
Edited 7/24/2004 3:48 pm ET by mikey
1,468 lbs on the 18' wall
lack of headers on the 27' makes it
1,073 lbs.
leave the double plates off cept at the splices..
Buy wall jacks..Proctor.
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
Wow thanks. As you were answering I was adding wise a$$ but true additional facts. I really appreciate it. I told my wife before I started that someone would say buy proctor wall jacks.Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
only buy them if ya want to be able to work with out pain for a while longer..no kiddin.
Tear up yer back playin superman, and youre home watchin Oprah for free...not good.
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
Are you saying the 18' wall will be 400lbs heavier because I have 3 2"x10"x6or7' as a header over the window? I'm missing something here.Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
no, no, those #'s were strictly in jest..but in way, yes, the headers will add a lot more weight..
ever consider Mike Smith's hollow insulated headers? They won't shrink and crack drywall, they are full of insul. and they DON'T WEIGH AS MUCH..
as a Wild azz guess, I bet I am pretty close tho' maybe on the heavy side if the wood is dry.
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
Does the Mexican food hurt the lift, or help with the added propulsion?
"It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good."
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)
That depends on the octane of the salsa.
SamT
Hey! are you road trippin w/ us ? C'mon, 3 drivers will make it less tiring...
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
under full lift mode, I have seen it suddenly leave the host organism in an unfashionable manner..
That answer the question?
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations.
I think it has to do with timing. Fresh ingested may hurt the lift with tummy cramps , but gived a few hours and jet propeled wall lifts will be the result.
Sorry, I guess I'm an old f*rt, but it remiinds me of when my boss and I built a 15' tall wall for an indoor volleyball court he was building. We sheathed it too and it was long--don't remember exactly, but I think it was 50 feet! But what the hey, we had a huge fork lift, so we chain the top plates, cutting a hole in the sheathing in the center, to the forks and he begins lifting. I'm going to guide it onto the bolts in the slab. The bottom of the wall clears the bolts and things are looking good when the top plates tear away from the studs and sheathing and the wall crashes straight down, then tips toward the truck and breaks into three almost equal pieces sort of wrapping the truck. We wrestle the thing back flat and call it a day. The next day we lifted it in three pieces.
I plan to definately lift the long wall in 2 sections but am surprised I can't find this info to decide what's realistic. I did a google on building material weights and got nothing of value to me. I looked into wall jacks and 750$ is not in the budget. I'll probably frame the walls, start sheeting it and do test lifts every once in a while then cut the plates where it makes sense.
I'll ask the dw for beans the night before. Even if they don't give me more lift I can entertain my co-worker with my rendition of taps.Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
Your short wall will weigh in at about 750 lbs. The long wall about 1,050 lbs.
Thank you Ralph. That sounds reasonable. Can you tell me where you got the numbers to figure it out?
If I'm thinking correctly as we start lifting the 750# wall we'll be picking up 375# between two of us and it will get lighter as we go up. That's the maximum we might do with two guys and if I get the boss to stop by for ten minutes we'll do it no problem. The long wall split in two shouldn't be a problem.Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
There'a little section in the back of of my building code book that lists a few of the more common weights by square foot and cubic foot. It's close enough to back up a WAG.
You could get the qualcraft wall jacks (~$110.00/ea) or American Manf. ($80/ea + ship).from amazon.com. Or make some of your own using a winch and some 2x4 or 2x6. Someone posted a design plan here sometime back, or e-mail me and I'll try and send something.
m2akita
I briefly considered the lumber and winch homemade idea but never having used or seen a wall jack except in pictures I feel there is too much to lose doing it myself. The other brands are in my budget so I'll look into them. Thanks.Smile. It could be worse. You could be me working for you.
Wasn't it this last issue of FHB that they showed some cool home-made jacks--the jack didn't do the lifting, but fell into place as you lifted (like ratchets) to keep the wall from falling back. That would be an immense help, especially when you are at that bad spot where you have to make a transition in grip from underhand to overhand. Also helps to nail little upright cleats to the rim to keep the wall from falling off the deck (or some folks toe nail the bottom plate to the deck and let the nails bend and act like hinges as the wall goes up. It's a real drag to have the wall slide foreward and off the deck ('specially when you're on second floor!).
You could make a big "A" out of some stout boards and use a pully to the top plate and raise the wall with a come-along. But, as I mentioned earlier, make sure that top plate is very secure! (But in this case, the load would be more lateral, so the nails won't just slide right out of the studs.)
When I helped a guy build an addtition on his house, he insisted on sheathing the walls before raising them. They were only 12' long and 8' high, but he had cut like 6" slots by four feet long in the old roof and these walls had to be lifted and dropped into the slots at their far ends. Another guy and me were wresting with the first wall, the guy on the one end trying to partially climb the 12/12 roof to get the end in the slot and Greg is directing and cracking the whip because we're such wimps. Next wall, he grabbed that end and then saw that, hey, this was hard! No!?
I've done a couple long ones - alone, but I totally recommend using the Proctors to kleep you away from the doctors.
I would only suggest doing with the homemade kind of solution if you are only ever going to be doing this one time and have a cash shortage. If you are doing it professionally, you will spend 25-=50% of the cost of Proctors just making the substitute which will have a limited life expectancy, while the Protors will outlast a career of walll lifting and have some resale value.
Then, you have to figure the liability. if you have helpers and one gets hurt in a misguided design of a substitute tool or from overdoing the brute force thing, the workers comp issues come up.
from a business and ethical sense, it just doesn't work out to be doing this with any method other than the proctors, except for when, like on lots of our jobs, we are doing up to 30' with as many as five or six guys on it so nobody has to grunt that bad and there is plenty of backup if anything goes wrong.
But for those who do have to kick at it alone and broke, my longest solo lift was the gable ends on my own house. It was up on the third floor level where I didn't want to be working alone on pump staging for finish, so I framed it ( 28 feet long at 8/12) installed the window and siding and the barge rafter sets with fascia all on the deck. Then I stepped back to scratch my head...
I used a bar to get the first couple inches with shim blocks, and kept advancing that procedure, until I could get the hydraulic jack in under it which gave me another 8". Then I started the farmers jack working and set up some picks like the recent article shows so they would seat themselves just in case....
using the farmer's jack psrt way down the rake would lift the peak to six feet up. I had built it with a steel strap from floor to bottom plate to keep it from sliding out.
That's the point where it would have been a good idea to have had Jeff Buck and his bench pressing prowess. a wall with log siding and a barge rafter hanging out is pretty good and heavy. It is also the point where I happened to think that I didn't really want to get it up and have it fall on over the other side to the ground. That is another reason why the Proctors are a good thing. They have safety stops on the pole - if you remember to use them.
So I had to secure a rope of just the right length to be a safety keeper before I ligfted the rest of the way. To do that, I went back and forth from one end of the wall to the other, walking the 4x4 support leg further into it, untill that got too scary. Then I tacked on some ready braces to the top plates, got out my Mighty Grunt, and finished the job. Then the hard part was psychging myself up to to the next one the same way! If I had know then what I know now, I would have done whatever it takes to get my hands on those Proctors
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
Piffin- You ol' Yankee!!!
I remember back in the middle seventies a buddy stopped over 'Hey, you want a job helping build a house?'.
Neither of us knew anything but he had gusto enough to unknowingly get hired as a sub from a crooked contractor who practiced hiring newbies, not paying them and then bringing more of the same on when they quit until enough is done that his tail light cronies can come in to finish it out. Contractor finally ended up in jail.
Out in the sticks a ways the block foundation there, we frame the floor to ready for the arrival of the 'walls delivered by a semi truck'.
We'd never seen such a thing. Walls coming already put together with insulation even.
Of course the delivery arrived with a real windy day so the three of us are standing there scratching our heads awhile until my buddy drives over to the nearest country store where he hires some guys who were standing around.
That poor homeowner.
"sobriety is the root cause of dementia.", rez,2004
"Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of subatomic indeterminism.",Jack Williamson, The Legion of Time
I wonder if anybody makes a junior tower crane for residential building sites, like the ones you see on big commercial buildings. It wouldn't have to be very tall, just enough to get the roof trusses and roofing materials on. The boom might have to be nearly as long as on the big boys, though, to be able to put the tower in an out of the way place and still reach any point on the building footprint.
Hard to tell if such a thing might pay for itself. Paying laborers to hump stuff around is one thing, but it seems to me like even skilled tradesmen spend too much time humping stuff around.
And anyway, this would be cheaper than my previous bright idea, a pole barn with a built in bridge crane covering the whole site.
I'm sure Frenchy would concur that his IR lifts provide more utitiy than your crane.
Where is Frenchy anyways?
Jon Blakemore
I thought first about Frenchy and his lulls too.
but if anybody has what you are describing, if would probably be biljax company
http://www.biljax.com/splash.htm
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
best I could find...
http://www.biljax.com/products.asp?extraID=PC&catID=87
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
coupla years back ...
me and my buddy Joe just framed an addition wall .. all glass ... all header ....
somewhere around 20 ft long ...
plan was ... lift to the saw horses ... slide them in with our feet ..... and then bench press.
We get the thing .... barely ... up to the horses ...
catch out breath .... kinda ...
then "push" on ...
get the damn thing to mid chest .... right around the bench press "power" height ...
then have to go back to the horses!
Thry again ... same deal.
Third time ...
get maybe shoulder height ...
then Joe says ... "Are U even lifting?!?" ...
bad timing ... I think we were about to pass the apex ... instead I bust out laughing.
Turns out he was serious!
I was kinda think the same thing ... just didn't ask him ...
In a moment of silence ... Joe says ...
"You ever build a wall you couldn't lift? ....."
one of those Q's that just don't need answering ... but I did anyways ...
"Not till now ......."
we both got mad ... tried again ... got her up.
could barely brace it off ....
next wall ... the "long one" ... we left out the ply filler and the inside 2x12 of the header ...
sucked it up ... went to lift ...
Cake!
all that weight was in the header.
filled the ply and the 2x12 ... and both thot we shoulda had that thought maybe after the second .. or at least the third attempt.
I was a coupla years younger ... and actively hitting the gym ... that damn wall nearly killed me .... at the time ... I was benching a little below 300 on a regular basis ....
Jeff
Buck Construction, llc Pittsburgh,PA
Artistry in Carpentry
I don't know if it is possible, but I am thinkning rental jacks for a half day sound like a reasonable compromise. Easy work, no injuries, could nearly finish walls before standing them up. All you need is to find out where they are and how much.
Dan