Design Insights

Quite a while back, when I was working as a carpenter for a small contractor near Boone, NC, my hometown, we worked on a foundation for a log cabin.

It was mid-December, about 25 degrees Fahrenheit and driving snow. This contractor, generally of foul mood, was singing, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!” at the top of his lungs. It was indeed, and the temperature certainly felt like it. Not a good day to be laying cinderblocks.

A mason who had retired from Florida to the mountains was directing the work and setting the blocks for the corners of the foundation, leaving the contractor and the other carpenter to lay the blocks between the corners. As carpenters, not masons, we were under the mason’s direction; I was relegated to mixing the mortar, while a l

I would like to relate a story about how not to dig a hole. In the immortal words of humor columnist Dave Barry, I’m not making this up.

Some years ago, I was working as a carpenter for a contractor who was building a log cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. The footings had been poured and the cinderblock walls for the basement had been laid. Next up was the floor framing, but first we had to create a girder and support it from below with a column. Why the footing for this column had not been poured when the others were, I don’t know.

That day on the jobsite, there were myself, another carpenter, the contractor and two laborers. The contractor did some rough measurements in the basement, placed an X in the dirt with the toe of his boot, then called one of the lab

DFMA Engineering is a return to my roots. During my senior year of high school, I was torn between becoming a professional musician and an engineer. Ultimately, I decided to pursue engineering, and I was accepted at North Carolina State University to begin in the fall semester of 1983. That summer, before I headed off to Raleigh, I worked as a drafter for an engineering company in my hometown of Boone, North Carolina. Homebuilders would come in and have out-of-the ordinary designs or construction problems that needed structural review and analysis. Our licensed professional engineer would do the analysis, I would draft the design (paper and pencil in those days), then the engineer would seal the drawing with his stamp and signature. I thought that this was a pretty interesting job as a