Statics with Mike and Pete

My most challenging class so far has been Building systems 1. The teacher is a professional mechanical engineer with his own contracting firm. However, he has never taught a college class before. I have a nagging feeling he's doing this because the architects he deals with have no clue what he's talking about in structure. This sets up an interesting personality conflict in class. The teacher talks like a contractor and moves really quickly because its second nature to him, skipping the little steps in the problems. There's so much he's got to cover, he can only outline the reactions at this point. The class of architecture students is extremely detail oriented; we want to know exactly how everything works. One class he drew a framing diagram with a bunch of joists 4' on center (neglecting to explain what "on center" meant) spanning two beams. He started doing the math for one of the joists, and half the class became really flustered because he didn't explain which particular joist he describing. With his limited experiance, it took him five minutes to explain that it didn't matter which one he was describing becuase the forces and loading on them were the same. When one guy asked which end the reaction forces were occuring, he told him that it didn't matter, becaue it was an equally loaded beam and the forces were the same at either end. "You can call it x and y, a and b, or mike and pete as long as you're consistant". We all thought this was highly amusing. He also told us to return the textbook (which I didn't pick up yet ha-ha) because it was useless and spend the money on beer.

The last two weeks we covered the very basics of beams, loads, and construction materials in a really fast overview. This week, we started on the math. None of us have ever done anything remotely like this yet, so its really taking us awhile to get the hang of it. At this point, given a total load per square foot on a floor supported by a frame, we can calcualte the pounds/ft on any beam or joist, the total load on any beam, and the reaction loads at the ends of any span. Ultimately, this tells us how much loading is on the collumns and how strong the collumns need to be. This is actually pretty easy stuff once one understands the why and the units. Anyway, at the end of the class, we should be able to calculate loading on any part of a building, draw loading and moment diagrams, and calculate bending and shear forces.

First project is due monday! I've finished the two walls and most of the framing. Just need to work on the windows. Here's a computer model of it: click for larger view