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Steel Frame Construction with Rotational Bolt System from 360° Bolt

360 bolt

360° Bolt, a revolution in steel frame construction!

After almost 20 years of fabricating steel and erecting projects on site, SGA Engineering's Ted Sygidus had seen enough. "I've had enough of this," he told his younger brother, SGA's Operations Manager Darek Sygidus. "It has to stop, and I have an idea.."

Within 24-hours, that conversation in late 2011 turned into 360° Bolt, a product that incredibly needed very little tweaking and retooling to get to the stage where now, some seven months later, it is revolutionising the way that the steel construction industry is looking at Holding Down bolt cages.

So what is it?

The basis of Ted's frustration was simple. "Trying to locate a column on a cast-in HD bolt cage with as little as 3 mm tolerance is asking for trouble - I should know, I've seen it almost all my life. There's nothing more demoralising than going to site knowing that you have to modify your good work from the workshop, it's bad news for you, it's bad news for the contractor and it's bad news for the engineer, because you all have to go back and work on a solution. So we designed one!"

The basis of the 360° Bolt design is to provide up to 30mm of 360 degree movement of the bolt once it is cast in concrete. Through a simple but rigorously tested* design that features spherical washers to maintain solid contact between the HD bolts and the surface of the column, 360° Bolt eliminates the bulk of misalignment issues found on site.

"Invariably you're out up to 8-10 mm, but with a 2-3 mm tolerance, the fabrication team needs to go back and either 'blow out' the baseplate and weld in new tabs, or in cases where they might be more than the diameter of the bolt out, they have to drill in Chemset anchors, which is a band-aid solution that takes away much of the structural integrity of the job," Ted Sygidus added. "Now, with 360° Bolt, most of that is eliminated."

Being such a new product, with provision of stock to supply to site only available from late April, the 360° Bolt system is only now being introduced to projects around Victoria, and with some dramatic results.

Recently BUILDCORP Commercial erected a school as part of a multi-part project in Lyndale (Dandenong), in Melbourne's south-east, one side of which utilised the new 360° Bolt system.

BUILDCORP Commercial's Site Manager David Bores explains; "This particular template is an ES template which consists of six new classrooms and a wide open teaching space. We poured this particular slab in two sections, mainly because of the weather, so we decided to save some time with production by getting one side of the slab going.

"In the first half we used traditional holding down bolts, and as we were getting ready for the second half, we came across 360° Bolt which we used across the second half. We've seen huge benefits for us, mainly with time. For us as the managing contractor the timeframes of the program have been reduced significantly with reduction in issues like making good the original bolts. Not just from our point of view, but from the concreters point of view they've had a lot of cost reductions in terms of going back and rectifying all these bolts.

"We've found - and this is probably the fourth project we've used Holding Down bolts on - that it's almost impossible to get 100% correct to the millimetre. There's a lot of [reasons for] tolerances that go wrong, whether it's in the concrete pour, or the pressure in the slab moving things around, or people coming around with their helicopters trying to get everything right - even a slight movement can pop it out [of alignment] so it's been disappointing that after every pour we've had to have the structural steel crew go around and make good just about every bolt. That means a huge backcharge that goes back to the concreter that I guess if you look at it in the scheme of things, they would probably allow for and put a cost in the project from the start.

"We're really happy with the 360° Bolt system, because we've had almost no rectification in the second half.

"There were 30 columns in total that we installed in the first half and around 21 had to be modified, so well and truly more than half, and when you allow up to an hour with each column, it starts to add up in both costs and time.

"The only two that we had to make good on the second half were two that we were short with the 360° Bolt and we used the old traditional holding down systems and they again were out.

"You're always going to be 5mm, 6mm or 7mm out, no matter what you do, but with the 360° Bolt system, it all gets contained within that cylinder space so very easily rectified."

360° Bolt provides the necessary flexibility to move the columns not just to ensure they are located on the correct grid location, but for any minor alignment adjustments required during steel erection.

In the past other alternatives such as chemical anchors have been used to combat installation misalignments. However, these typically warrant for engineers to check through their calculations due to chemical anchor's lower HD capacity (not to mention inability to enforce manufacturer's installation procedures). Even then further misalignments could occur due to survey, set out or even installation errors (contact with reinforcing steel embedded in the concrete etc) - things that just don't happen with 360° Bolt.

Imagine no construction delays and no arguments between trades to work out who's at fault and who has to pay - all due to [often] minor misalignment of traditional HD bolt cages.

No matter what size of bolt is required from M12 to M30, 360° Bolt can meet site requirements, and it can cater for pad/strip footings, slab or pocket installations.

360° Bolt can be supplied to site as a flat-pack arrangement to be assembled on site, or they can be preassembled and delivered to site ready to install. The team at 360° Bolt also provide an installation service using Trimble's latest technology total station surveying equipment, providing a guarantee of accuracy for the job.

Cost-wise, the product comes in on par with traditional HD bolt cages - assuming you get the job done right - if not, there's no comparison, 360° Bolt comes out on top every time, and it also saves expensive time delays in repairing work on-site. There really is no down side..

The team at 360° Bolt also have their own engineer to address any questions from architects, engineers or contractors about the use of and integrity of 360° Bolt, with much of the available data on the product accessible from their website; www.360bolt.com

They have also prepared production drawings in CAD to allow engineers and draftsmen to seamlessly include the product into site plans, and their team are available to address any questions from the outset, all the way through to placing the cages onsite themselves to ensure the accuracy of the job.

Further information, including a more detailed look at how the 360° Bolt systems works, is on the website; www.360bolt.com and for further information, please contact the 360° Bolt team direct.

* 360° Bolt has been designed in accordance with relative Australian Standards and tested in NATA approved testing laboratories revealing that 360° Bolt anchor plates don't even yield at the bolt's ultimate capacity (see www.360bolt.com/images/stories/ALSTests.pdf)

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