Caught a framing mistake on a 12-story hotel in Denver last spring

I was walking the site to check shear wall layout when I noticed the steel studs were spaced at 24 inches on a 60 foot long wall. The engineer specs called for 16 inch spacing because of the wind load at that height. Nobody caught it in the shop drawings somehow. I made them redo the whole wall before we poured any concrete. Cost the steel crew like 4 extra days but saved way more in future repairs. Has anyone else had a sub try to sneak in wider spacing to save time?

2 comments

2 Comments

robinson.jake5d ago

Man I've seen this EXACT move. A crew tried to run 24 inch spacing on a 40 foot shear wall in a parking garage near Seattle. I made them pull every third stud and add blocking plus extra straps to hit the load rating. The foreman argued it was fine until I showed him the engineer's wind load calculations on the prints. The worst part is they KNOW better, they just bet you won't catch it during a busy day. Always check the first few bays of every shear wall before they get too far along. I keep a copy of the spec on my clipboard and mark the spacing with a sharpie right on the studs as they go up.

margaret2345d ago

The one thing nobody's bringing up is how this affects the hold downs and tie-downs at the ends of the wall. I caught a job in Tacoma where they ran the studs at 24 inches but also used the wrong size anchor bolts because the original layout was for 16 inch centers. When you spread those studs out, the load path changes completely and the engineer's stamped calculations for the hold down hardware don't line up anymore. The inspector missed it because he was only checking bolt spacing, not stud spacing. Ended up having to get the engineer to re-do the connection design on site (which cost everyone a whole day). So yeah, the stud spacing is a red flag, but what really keeps me up at night is all the hardware that gets installed wrong because nobody re-checks the whole system after a spacing change like that.