Blogs

It's 100 degrees outside. Your steering wheel is approximately the temperature of the sun. The air conditioner is doing its best. Then you see it. A section of pavement ahead looks like somebody pushed the road together from both ends and made it pop upward. Sometimes it happens fast enough to become a traffic hazard. The road buckled. But why? Concrete looks pretty solid. How does a material strong enough to carry tractor-trailers suddenly decide to stand up in the middle of the highway? The sh …

Cranes are impressive machines. They can pick up steel, concrete, equipment, materials, and loads weighing more than most of us would ever want to calculate while standing underneath them. But look at a crane closely and you'll notice something interesting. While the crane is lifting a massive load on one side, there's often a massive amount of weight hanging off the other. Which seems a little ridiculous at first. We're already asking the crane to handle thousands of pounds. Now we're deliberat …

Some structures are instantly recognizable. You can see a massive cooling tower from miles away. Wide at the bottom. Narrow through the middle. Then wider again near the top. It looks a little like an enormous concrete hourglass. And if you've ever driven past a power plant and seen one releasing a giant white cloud into the sky, you may have wondered two things: Why is it shaped like that? And what exactly is coming out of it? The answers are connected. That strange shape isn't just architectur …

Every small town seems to have one. A giant tank sitting way up in the air with the town's name painted across it. Sometimes it's the first thing you see coming into town. Sometimes it's decorated. Sometimes it's been standing there so long nobody really notices it anymore. But if you stop and think about it, a water tower is kind of strange. We take hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of gallons of water and deliberately put it high above the ground. That requires a massive structure. En …

Let's get one thing out of the way first. Your brick wall isn't actually breathing. It doesn't inhale. It doesn't exhale. And if yours starts doing either one, you have a considerably different problem than the one we're discussing today. When people in construction say masonry needs to "breathe," we're talking about moisture movement. Brick, block, stone, and mortar are not completely waterproof materials. Moisture can enter masonry, move through portions of the wall system, and eventually need …