![]() ![]() ![]() Avada designer Ray Gurney was one of those who stood and stared at the two men building the first floor with I-joists from Boise Cascade. Time-saving innovations at the Parsonage included thin-joint blockwork and a beam and block ground floor. The barn conversion specialist wants to cut construction time so it can save money on labour and get a faster return on its investment by finishing and selling houses more quickly. The Parsonage, a 2,600 sq ft detached house, was Avada’s very first new-build project and the company had decided to eschew traditional building materials. When Avada Country Homes put the first floor in for a three-storey home near Cromer in Norfolk, everyone on site gathered round to watch. Joist to the world Precut board proveS big - and we mean big - hit The fibres end up evenly distributed to within a few millimetres of the surface of the concrete. The glue dissolves and the fibres separate soon after the Dramix is put in the concrete mixer - at the batching plant or in the mixing truck. But if you’ve got to cast a 1000m2 floor, pouring Dramix will save you the day you’d otherwise have to spend meshing – as well as a day’s wages for the meshers.ĭramix fibres are about 2in long and come glued together in clumps. These are problems the site agent just doesn’t want.”ĭramix is more expensive than mesh per square metre – mesh, after all, is very cheap to buy while a fair bit of Dramix has to go into the concrete. “Mesh is major work and there are safety issues and methods statements, which are difficult to cost. “It’s going to save a huge amount of time on site,” says Johnstone. The concrete pumped perfectly and wire cutters weren’t needed. It’s going to save a huge amount of time on site He chose a house near the River Ouse, with a 150m2 ground floor built on flood basements that lifted it a metre above ground level. Recalling the nightmare stuff about early steel fibres - they balled up and clogged the pump, or protruded from the surface of the concrete and had to be snipped off one by one - Johnstone deliberately made the trial job a small one. Belgian company Bekaert, founded by the eponymous inventor of barbed wire, makes the Dramix steel fibres that give concrete all the advantages of steel mesh - strength, anti-cracking control and slab integrity in a fire - without the installation disadvantages of actually using any.ĭerek Johnstone, MD of steel decking installer MSW, has used Dramix with Ward Multideck 60 profiled metal floordeck at a site at Buckden in Cambridgeshire. So why use it at all? Steel fibre-reinforced concrete has been around for years for ground floors and tunnels now you can pour it at any floor level you like. Even when it’s down on the decking, resting on its little plastic stools, ready for burial by concrete, mesh is still a hazard for construction workers. Then you’ve got to crane it - and that’s a thousand pounds a day - into position, with all the safety problems and site disruption that involves. The 40ft trailers it arrives on are a curse on the tight, city centre sites where multi-storey concrete-floored office blocks go up. Just getting the mesh to the floor where it’s needed is a major operation. And the unwieldy 8ft by 4ft sheets buckle and twist, making them difficult to handle and place, even with a man at each corner. You spend a day meshing a 1000m2 floor before you can cast your concrete. Building Boardroom Digital Construction AcademyĭRAMIX STEEL FIBRE takes the mesh out of concreteįor the site agent stuck in a cabin trying to get the project built, steel mesh is nothing but a pain.Construction Business: Strategy, Risk and Regulations.
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