Removing your old staircase, knocking out the dividing wall, and opening up your lounge is a great idea. Light floods into the room from upstairs. You get the open plan living you’re hankering for. And you can put in a contemporary glass and stainless steel balustrade while you’re at it.

For most people this stays just a pipe dream because they get the wrong people in for a quote. Builders don’t know the ins and outs of designing a stair, so they up the price so they can get a specialist to supply them. Carpenters design and build you a timber stair but are lost when it comes to glass and steel. Steelworkers will put you in a nice stair and balustrade, but it will look industrial with an industrial price tag. All these trades will quote high, and that’s what puts most people off.

But  all’s not lost. The key is simply to manage the project yourself. Get the best people in for each component part. That way they remain happy doing what they do best, and are not spooked into overpricing. All you need to have to achieve this is a superb drawing done by someone who’s lived and breathed staircase design. And that’s where I come in!

Send me an email with your questions or send details of your pipe dreams to quotes at design-in-steel.co.uk and I’ll see what I can do.

Now that Eurocodes are out, we need to learn how to use them. There’s a fantastic project called the Eur Ing Project (European Engineer) at www.n-aktive.co.uk. This is an e-learning site showing you step by step how to design a complete multi storey steel frame building right through to cladding and connection design. It references the relevant help files on the Access Steel site. Well done to Sheffield University for spear-heading this great resource!

Here’s the hole dimensions, edge distance and clearances for Lindapter Hollo-Bolts.

Another 400 job cuts have just been announced by Corus, the UK’s biggest steel provider, which was formerly British Steel. This brings the total Corus jobs axed this year to around 5000 according to Sky News, almost 1000 of which are at the Scunthorpe factory.

What’s of further concern to those working within the steel industries is their statement that “it may take 10 years before trade is back to 2009 levels”.

See the full story here.

Yesterday Corus announced another 2000 job cuts at UK plants. Now that’s an indication that all sorts of problems are coming for you and me. Yes, we may not be employed directly by Corus, but wherever in the steel industry we are it doesn’t bode well.

Raw materials are an indicator of general industry health

If Corus is suffering; it’s only because we are. In the steel industry we have the unique priviledge of having only one major UK steel supplier. That means we can easily see how well we’re doing, based on how well Corus is doing. In other industries that’s more difficult to see because we have to collate data from lots of suppliers. What these job cuts mean for us is that production is down in a major way. And for every steel worker there are probably two or three workers elsewhere in the industry who will be let go too. Just think about how much steel just one steel-plant worker produces, and how many other people that steel affects: Transporters, Stockists, Fabricators, Draughtsmen, Engineers, Erectors, Support staff… and that’s just within the Structural Steel fabrication business.

Statistics of doom

Other statistics have been pointing to this for some time. Going by the UK Steel Key Statistics 2009 report, steel deliveries to UK stockholders halved between the beginning and end of 2008.

Is there a solution for the steel industry?

So the big question is: what do we do about this? Do we just wait for half of our jobs to just disappear? There seems to be no easy answer. The difficult answer is that we all have to tighten our belts. If there is half as much work around, there is half as much money around, which either means half as many jobs, or we all have to take cuts in pay or work less hours to spread the money across more people.

There’s an AEC industry report due out on 1st July which hopes to set out the way forward. Hopefully it includes a word for the steel industry. You can register your interest in the report here: Thriving in the downturn report.

A new series of training worshops is being held by Thomas Telford Training on the design of steel structures to Eurocode EC3. Dates are as follows:

09 Jun 2009 Birmingham
14 Sep 2009 London
18 Nov 2009 Wilmslow

See the website for details

The Steel Construction Institute seems to think that conversion to the Structural Eurocodes is an inevitability. But has anyone considered the cost to you and me for this transition? And what benefit do we gain from moving to Eurocodes anyway?

Below is a table showing which Eurocode documents will replace BS 5950:1 which covers the majority of general steelwork design. As you can see, the one BS document is replaced by four Eurocodes. And that’s not the only curious difference. For each Eurocode there’s also a National Annex which converts the general European code back into a UK code again. So UK engineers will have to buy a document to convert our way of working into European; and then another document to convert it back to British.

And what do we have to pay for the priviledge of such a convoluted way of working? Over three times as much as before, as you can see from the following graph. The graph shows the cost for BSI members, and guess what? Non members get to pay double.

An unnecessary evil?

The SCI in February brought out the results of their member survey on the adoption of the Eurocodes. Over 75% of respondents said they would only move to Eurocodes “if forced to do so” or never! That’s a very significant majority indeed. And when we consider that the membership of the SCI includes just about every large consultant or contractor involved with steel, it just about amounts to a full scale mutiny against the Eurocodes.

Google SketchUp is being used by companies to design products, manufacture, and even market them through 3D Warehouse. If you haven’t yet looked into this possibility for your products, check out this case study for Steelcase Office Furniture:

Steelcase saves time and money with Google SketchUp

B Rourke & Co Ltd supply wrought iron components, castings, forged metal and fixings for gate making. They have a special offer on gate automation kits available until the end of March:

Gate automation kits special offer

Crime inevitably increases when the economy enters periods of instability. But there’s a way to capitalise on this. If you are a steel fabricator or building contractor it is well worth having some security related products in your portfolio. That’s why we’ve produced this design for an anti ram raid bollard for you to download free of charge. It’s designed to be fabricated and installed without the need for bespoke parts or specialist tools.

These images can be freely used for your own brochure or product literature.