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Steel trusses come in a handful of recurring shapes — Pratt, Warren, Howe, Fink, king post and queen post, north-light, plus a few flat and specialty profiles. The name of each one mostly describes how its internal web members are arranged. Which shape belongs on a given building depends far less on looks than on … Read more

Structural steel welding joins load-bearing members, including columns, beams, base plates, and stiffeners, into one continuous frame by melting their edges so the metal flows together and solidifies as a single piece. Most of that work happens inside a fabrication shop, where built-up sections are made under controlled conditions; out on site, erectors often switch … Read more

A steel structure connection is the joint that moves force from one member into another, and how well it does that decides whether the frame stands or sways. Connections are grouped two independent ways, and the two are easy to confuse even though they answer different questions. The first grouping is the joining method: what … Read more

Rafters and joists are both repeating framing members, but they sit in different planes and carry different loads. A rafter slopes from the roof’s peak down to the wall to hold up the roof, while a joist runs flat between supports to hold up a floor or ceiling. They are not two names for the … Read more

Steel frame bracing keeps a building from racking sideways or collapsing under wind and seismic loads by carrying those horizontal forces down through the frame to the foundation. The job is split across a few distinct systems — cross (X) bracing made from rods, cables, or angles; rigid portal frames; and wind columns — supported … Read more

Cross bracing is a pair of diagonal steel members set in an X across one bay of a frame, and it exists to carry sideways loads — mostly wind and earthquake — safely down to the foundation. Push a bare rectangle of columns and beams from the side and it racks, leaning over into a … Read more

The interior walls of a metal building are usually finished with one of five materials: exposed steel panels, steel liner panels, fiberglass-reinforced panels (FRP), plywood or OSB, or drywall over framing. The one that lasts depends on how the room is used and on whether the steel frame was specified to carry a rigid finish. … Read more

Leveling a building site means turning raw, uneven ground into a flat, compacted, well-drained pad through a fixed sequence: clear the surface, survey to a benchmark, cut down the high spots and fill the low ones, compact the fill in layers, and finish-grade so water runs away from the building. That sequence matters more for … Read more

A building footing should sit at least 12 inches below undisturbed soil and below the local frost line, whichever is deeper. In practice that puts the bottom of most footings anywhere from about 12 inches in frost-free regions to 4 feet or more across the northern United States. For a steel building, that frost-and-soil minimum … Read more

A pier and beam foundation supports a structure on a grid of concrete piers tied together by beams, leaving a ventilated crawl space between the ground and the building above. For a steel building, the frame’s columns hand their loads to individual piers and a reinforced grade beam instead of to one continuous slab. Builders … Read more