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I thought id share this post about the progress of my loft conversion as a reference for others who may need some tips if doing them yourselves.
So yesterday we got the spliced beams put in.
They are resting on 30mm x 100mm x 450mm steel base plates which were imbedded using a 1/3 sharp sand mortar mix, the thickness is about 20mm.
The overall length of the steel beams is 5.88 meters (rsj specs 201x201x46kg) spliced into 3 equal peices. Each peice weighed about 93kg.
It took 4 of us to carry these through the house, slide it up a loft ladder, then into position on the base plates. Now bare in mind 2 of these guys are big lads who are powerlifters, without them it would have been difficult to get these into the loft. They are difficult to manouver in tight spaces.
In the loft, we put the side peices onto the wall plate/padstone first, then the center spliced peice. We used bits of wood to level them up, then used pre-loaded 10.9 grade high strength bolts and 10mm steel plates to bolt them together. Overall we used 160 bolts across the 2 beams.
The steel providers said we do not need to use a torque wrench, just tighten them as tight as we can get them, then work our way around re-tightening them (as when you tighten some, others can become slightly loose).
Thankfully as the base plates were carefully levelled, the beams were perfectly level. However they did provide us with a few steel shims had we needed to raise the beams to level.
Heres a few pics
So yesterday we got the spliced beams put in.
They are resting on 30mm x 100mm x 450mm steel base plates which were imbedded using a 1/3 sharp sand mortar mix, the thickness is about 20mm.
The overall length of the steel beams is 5.88 meters (rsj specs 201x201x46kg) spliced into 3 equal peices. Each peice weighed about 93kg.
It took 4 of us to carry these through the house, slide it up a loft ladder, then into position on the base plates. Now bare in mind 2 of these guys are big lads who are powerlifters, without them it would have been difficult to get these into the loft. They are difficult to manouver in tight spaces.
In the loft, we put the side peices onto the wall plate/padstone first, then the center spliced peice. We used bits of wood to level them up, then used pre-loaded 10.9 grade high strength bolts and 10mm steel plates to bolt them together. Overall we used 160 bolts across the 2 beams.
The steel providers said we do not need to use a torque wrench, just tighten them as tight as we can get them, then work our way around re-tightening them (as when you tighten some, others can become slightly loose).
Thankfully as the base plates were carefully levelled, the beams were perfectly level. However they did provide us with a few steel shims had we needed to raise the beams to level.
Heres a few pics
