Blogs

There may not be a more dangerous unit of measurement in construction than "five minutes." How long will you be up there? Five minutes. How long will it take to grab that piece? Five minutes. Do we really need to move the ladder? Nah. It'll only take five minutes. Should we put the guardrail back? We're almost done. Do we need to set all that up just for this? It's only a quick job. Construction has somehow developed an unwritten rule that if a task can theoretically be completed before your cof …

Some construction questions sound almost too simple to ask. Why are manholes round? Because they're holes? Not necessarily. We make square openings all the time. Rectangular ones too. So somewhere along the way, engineers and utility designers had choices. And yet, all over the world, you keep seeing the same basic thing in streets and sidewalks: A round hole with a round cover. Turns out, there's a pretty good reason for that. Actually, there are several. And one of them is wonderfully simple: …

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 …

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 …

Concrete cracks. There. We said it. Not exactly the opening line the concrete industry would put on a billboard, but it's true. Concrete is one of the most useful construction materials in the world. We build foundations, highways, bridges, sidewalks, parking garages, warehouses, dams, and entire buildings with it. It's strong. It's durable. And given enough time and the right conditions, it is probably going to crack somewhere. Which brings us to all those lines, cuts, and gaps you've seen in c …