Dinosaurs

Once we had a trailer load of panels in our storage space next to the building, we would inspect them to see if they needed any repairs after their journey across Donner Pass. And we always had some damage. The most irritating damage was having the panels ‘smoked’. The owner of the building had decided on a white synthetic plaster finish and all it took to ruin the looks of them was diesel exhaust blowing across the panel surface for 100 miles or more. A poorly tuned diesel at that. The first truckload was delivered without being tarped and they had large black streaks on them, plus some additional damage from the binders that held them in place. I had to insist on tarps from then on, but that persistent smoke could still find its way onto the load; turning the outer panels a light gray in color.

After the repairs were complete, we had to find a way to move the huge panels from the trailer and over to a spot on the ground below where they were to be installed. We had a large forklift and some portable stop signs and we would try and halt traffic just long enough to move down L Street and place the panel, resting upright, against the building. Halting traffic without a permit was frowned upon by the authorities and getting a permit each time we needed 5 minutes of hauling time was more trouble than it was worth.

Up on the 6^th floor were our hoisting machines. Nicknamed ‘dinosaurs’, they had a short boom section coupled to a 220 volt 2 phase motor and some reduction gears that would allow it to hoist about 3,000 pounds. Each ‘dinosaur’ had wheels and counterweights to allow for heavy lifting. Plus, a section of pipe that we would raise to the deck above us, clamping the ‘dinosaur’ in place.

And since the ‘dinosaur’ couldn’t always be directly above the panel to be lifted, we used ‘snatch blocks’ to reroute the hoisting cable to a spot where it would work best. It was all improvisation and sometimes the cable was running at 45° to the ground and then back again, depending on what kind of obstructions we had to deal with. No one had ever done this before and so every time we successfully lifted a panel and welded it in place, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I almost forgot to mention the trees; the City of Sacramento was quite proud of it’s designation as a Tree City and the building permit stipulated that NO tree was to be removed or damaged during the construction of the building. Unfortunately, some existing trees were growing right over the building. This meant that sometimes we had to arrive on the jobsite at 6 in the morning while it was still dark. When the sun rose at 7, the offending branch was usually gone and the dumpster was full and covered.

Back in Sacramento…

Progress on the 777 L Street job was slow at first. The first 5 floors were made for parking and so the building was very ordinary at that point; rectangular. But once the building rose past the 6^th floor, there were all sorts of setbacks and jutting balconies to be framed. And by the time the building topped out with a heliport on the 17^th floor, it had a much smaller footprint at that level. To help the crew, and me, I decided to build a model of the building. I bought the heavy card stock and glue and an X-Acto knife. I spent my evenings at the ‘company apartment’ cutting and gluing until I had it completed. Now I could share my ‘vision’ with the crew. (Imagine how easily it can be done today with BIM)

It didn’t take long for the panel plant in Reno to build the panels that would enclose the lower parking levels. They were quite ordinary in appearance and wouldn’t take us long to install; except for one thing - I mentioned the building footprint; well, at ground level, the building took up all of the available working and storage space on three sides. The west side was a short and private alleyway and at most we could put one trailer load of panels in there. And only if the truck driver was good enough to snake a 40’ flat in there…backing it in from a very busy L Street.

A memory; I was standing on the 6^th floor and looking east up L Street. As far as I could see, (a long way!) cars were stopped in the west bound lanes. There was no traffic in the east bound lanes. Horns were blaring. And directly below me was our truck, jackknifed across all four lanes and up onto the sidewalk as the driver fought to slip the trailer through that narrow 12’ opening.

BIM -

Building Information Modeling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Progress.

When I started in the construction business, 'blue line' drawings were new and the standard was still an architectural drawing made with white lines on a dark blue background. And you had to have a certain skill to be able to make sense of those drawings. Spatial relationships. And not everyone was capable of it.

Luckily for me, I was able to make sense of them and interpreting these drawings became my career.

Then came CAD, computer aided drawings that could quickly be changed and reprinted. But they were still just lines on a piece of paper.

But BIM... a revolution! I only wish I was there to take part in it.

Where was I?

Let's see...I have finished the Steakhouse story and I've probably told you enough about Saint Mary's Hospital. I worked in Reno for 11 years and so there are plenty of 'monuments' of mine around that town. Maybe it's time for me to remember the out of town work...not necessarily in chronological order.

As I wrote earlier, C. Solari and Sons was heavily into the prefabricated panel business. And when there weren't enough casino hotels to build panels for, the estimators would look for business elsewhere. We had a huge panel plant and needed to keep it busy.

One day I was asked if I wanted to run some work out of town; Sacramento to be exact. The estimators had picked up a new project, a 17 story building in the heart of downtown Sacramento. 777 'L' Street, right across the street from the bus terminal and within sight of the Capitol.

It sounded like a good career move and there was talk of opening a branch office in Sacramento. I signed on for the job.

The first thing to do was to scout the area for a temporary office and a 'yard' to hold any equipment or panels. We found a plastering contractor that was going out of business, retiring, and they had the perfect setup for us on 'C' Street, right behind the levee. Then I found an apartment and I was ready to do business.

I went to the local Carpenter's Union and signed up with them, explaining that I would probably need a dozen men that could weld and work with structural steel.

Then it was time to look at the jobsite. I had driven by a few times and had even stopped once to introduce myself. Now it was time to examine the structure and see how well it was being built in order for us to weld panels onto the frame. It had to be square and plumb for it's full height and ironworkers, the ones bolting it all together,worked to different tolerances. We had to be accurate to within 1/4". Ironworkers worked to within 1". This could lead to some tension on the jobsite.

I had hired 3 men and so the first thing we did was to survey the work that had been done by the ironworkers; using a laser to see how plumb the steel was. Oops! it wasn't plumb at all, and since the steel had been bolted up all of the way to the 7th floor, it was going to be a fight to get the ironworkers to fix it.

After some tense negotiations, we all agreed on what was to be done and I agreed to furnish laser measurements for the ironworkers to follow from that point on.

More later...

Back in the Steak House

It was probably one of the most frustrating projects I had ever been involved with. Once you were up in the restaurant ceiling, it took so long to get back down, you would simply stay up there as long as possible. Right through lunch. It was also painful; metal lath has a very sharp cutting edge to it and could even slice through leather gloves if you weren’t careful. Bandaids were essential. We also had to create some of our own tools to get the job done. We welded long handles on to our wire tying nippers so that we could reach the work from some impossible locations. And dirty! Remember, this was above a restaurant ceiling where there had been a grease fire. Plus, the cold rolled steel channel we used for framing was coated with a sticky black paint that would spray paint fragments whenever it was cut or bent. At the end of the day, our faces were liberally sprinkled with the sticky black flecks. What fun!

And once we had finished the long horizontal run of ductwork, we actually stood up where the duct turned 180°, becoming vertical and went up the mechanical shaft to the first floor. It was a large shaft, about 15’ square and once we put a light in it, we saw that it was filled with all of those pipes that we had been fighting for the past week. But…there was room for us to build a scaffold of sorts. We were going to build a scaffold on top of a plaster ceiling that was suspended over a stairwell. Brilliant!

And so we did. Bringing long planks up through the maze of pipes and then nailing it all together. Below, on the stairs, we built props to hold the ceiling up while we worked above. At the same time, the plasterers were following us through the ceiling as they applied plaster to all of that lath we had put in place for them. This meant, when we crawled back down, we were crawling through wet plaster that they had spilled. Plasterers are not the neatest of craftsmen.

End of the story? Of course we finished the project; we always did. But it was a struggle that we all remembered for a long time.