Prolyte: From a distance all trusses look the same. On closer examination, however, differences become apparent. Joining together trusses from different manufacturers places a high risk of liability on different parties: the user, the employer, the owner and the manufacturer/distributor. This risk is based on the effect of different legal spheres such as product safety, product liability, warranty and reliability as well as stability and load bearing capacity.
2 comments:
So this article is interesting to me in that it’s probably a situation that at some point in our lives we will eventually experience. You are designing a structure made out of truss but you are working with a possible mixed bag of products. For many the guy opinion would be that truss is truss and if you can make a connection it works, but my head just has to thoughts going through it with that line of thought first there is the Boveors statement that is when using a product in terms of technical design you need to be willing to defend that choice in court if everything manage to go wrong. That said you should use the product as the manufacturer has specified that it be used. This may mean that you are limiting choices that you are pretty sure mathematically work and practically may have done but unfortunately in our industry we aren’t engineers and legally it puts you a difficult position. To type into that thought is that we understand the basic principles of trusses and also the principles of bolted conections this this should be a easy thing to combine the two things and get answers, but as Kevin would say “there be dragons,” just use the product as the manufacturer says and call it a day.
Sometimes it's just not worth it. This reminds me of an ongoing problem we've been having with turnbuckles. When striking a turnbuckle, it is so easy to just take the pins out of the jaws or just to screw the whole thing off, and many times people don't have the wherewithal to put all of the original parts of the turnbuckle back together. This is where the rub comes, because at the end of the night, you end up with a couple complete turnbuckles with all their original hardware intact, and a bunch of turnbuckle parts or turnbuckle jaws without bolts. But no problem right? Just throw a random bolt in the jaw and you'll be right as rain. Well, as David Boevers likes to say, you have to imagine yourself sitting in the witness stand in court with a lawyer asking you the question "Well, did you do everything according to the manufacturer's specifications?". The fact of the matter is, that using a turbuckle without its original hardware is wildly against manufacturer's specifications, and really there's no other recourse than to throw it away.
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