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Description:
Dowco has recently completed the detailing of the above project, which is located in Charlottesville, Virginia. The fabricator is Hirschfeld Steel Company, in San Angelo, Texas. The General contractor is Barton Mallow, the architect is VMDO and Ellerbe Becket carried out the engineering, with connection design provided by Ferrell Engineering. This is a 15,000-seat arena with an overall estimated construction cost of $129.8 million and is scheduled to open for use in June of 2006. It comprises approximately 2,500 tons of steel and Dowco produced 79 Erection Diagrams, 49 Anchor/Embed Diagrams and 3,110 detail drawings.
Last October, Malcolm Muir and myself traveled to San Angelo to meet with the Hirschfeld project management team and also with Ferrell Engineer’s design team. This meeting set the groundwork for what was to become a very amicable and productive working relationship.
The project was broken into 4 main sequences, 2 for the floors and 2 for the roof, with these further broken down to a total of 67 priorities. Modeling and checking of the main steel commenced in October 2003, with the initial main concern, being to provide Hirschfeld Steel with the Advance Bills.
Dowco’s team was then split into two groups, one working on the modeling, connecting and detailing of the embedded material and the other working on the roof structure. This part of the project was, as you might expect, the most complicated, with the main truss designed to support 11 other trusses, all of the infill steel and catwalks for more than half of the entire roof structure.
The main truss and all of the members connected to it had to incorporate the camber required to bring the roof to it’s finished position once the “fully loaded” deflection came into play.
The detailing of the remaining roof structure had to take into consideration similar problems where trusses were cambered and catwalk and fixed wall steel had to connect. This was done by staggering connections between cambered trusses and other incoming members.
This main truss and most of the secondary trusses were field assembled, using bolted connections. The erection of the main truss occurred on a Saturday, late in October (see accompanying photographs) and on the Monday following, we received a call from the erector to say that he had never seen a truss of that size go together and erect so easily.
At the time of writing this report approximately 50% of the roof structure has now been erected. The feedback we have received from the field on how well this part of the project has gone together has been very positive. This is wonderful feedback and speaks not only to the accuracy of X-Steel and the people utilizing it, but also to the excellent quality control in Hirschfeld’s fabrication shop.
The work in detailing the floor steel in various areas is all but complete, following a considerable number of design changes. All but a few of the detail drawings have been issued for fabrication.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the successful completion of this challenging project.
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