Chermside Food Store.
Firstly Happy New Year. I hope 2016 will be better and more Laser Scanning, BIM Surveys and layouts will be required by Australia's Construction industry and the world over.
Its been 6 months since I complete this food store project but I have finally managed to get a couple of pictures to show the finished store.
I was asked to survey existing columns and the interior of the roof of this food store so we could then add on steel work to extend the store about 8m to the side. The problem, as with all these stores, was that they couldn't close, keep the public away or open up too many holes due to weather issues so a good BIM survey was the solution.
Armed with a Trimble TX5 Laser Scanner and the trusty Trimble RTS773 Robotic Total Station I went to site. Due to problems with getting to the existing steel work I had to use both pieces of equipment to gather all of the required information to produce the new steel model. The scanner could not see enough of the existing columns so I shot the center of these with the RTS. The scanner picked up the rest of the details and roof slope. The survey did pick up a grid problem from the start so we straight away could factor this in. (The marked Grid was 50mm longer than the store and consequently the existing columns did not match the grid marked out by the builder)
The next challenge was to scan the inside of the roof space so we could get the plant area steel work that was to be extended and the internal trusses. this is challenging in a working store with the public around but it worked well. I use Trimble Realworks to trim out the details I want from the internal scans and then load them into Tekla Structures as reference models.
The steel detailing model was born from this information and delivered ahead of schedule to the fabricator. Once the steel was fabricated I then returned to site to mark out the weld on cleats and base drillings that were required. I also checked the 2 cast in bolt sets for the relocated sign and found that they were placed about 25mm south of where they should have been. Using this info we were able to alter the new sign bases prior to the steel being painted. This saved a lot of money and heartache.
The steel went together well with no alterations and as you can see from the above photos the overall finish is excellent. This was a relatively simple job I admit but it brought together all of the services that BIMTek offers, it saved the fabricator and undoubtedly the builder money by spotting problems prior to installation and it saved heaps of time.
Information is power. If you know what you are building to you are forearmed and a whole less stressed out.