I wish I had my camera.
I am sleeving a deck for a condo tower using PROSET sleeves.
Decks are 3/4″ MDO_PLYWOOD over aluminum truss called a “table”.
Rod buster foreman tells me he drove one of my cans through the deck.
I was like OK he broke one, I put in about 150 to 250 standard pipe sleeves per deck & another 150 to 200 small bore sleeves per deck as well.
I’m used to having to replace a few every deck.
He said “no, it didn’t break it went through the deck”. I’m like no friggin way.
I wasn’t buying it, but sure enough when I got over there there was a 4″ sleeve (5″ OD) collar still nailed to the deck & the center sleeve was driven through the plywood in an almost perfect 5″ round hole.
The pvc sleeve barrel was still in tact.
2 layers of 3/4″ MDO will almost stop a 9mm round & the rod buster drove a 5″ hole though it.
They had a “hard landing” of a bundle of PT cables.
I was telling him you had to hit that dead nuts perfect or the pvc will just shatter all over the place.
I’ve never seen anything like that before in my whole career.
Replies
Hey Bill,
For us residential guys, what is a "rod buster" please? To punch a clean 5" hole in 3/4" MDO it must move pretty fast.
Bill
A rodbuster is a concrete worker who specializes in installing concrete reinforcement rods - also know as rebar. I guess the Post Tension cable comes under his realm too. Maybe the reason they call it buster is because theoretically there could be quite a bit of bending of rod involved - but in reality in highrise construction, as far as I know, a lot of it (most?) comes pre-bent. One of his main tools might be a "pig tail" which is one of those spinner tools they use for twisting up the tie wires. - or I don't know - they probably have electric ones... For that matter I'm guessing they have hydralic benders too...
I think he fibbed a bit about the "hard landing". It's another way of saying we dropped a 1800# spool of cable from 2 stories up....
Edited 7/19/2008 6:13 am ET by Matt
I see.... I thought from Plumbbill's post that the rodbuster was some sort of mechanical device. So the MDO puncture was caused by the heavy drop of the PT cables. Bill's amazement is that the PVC sleeve did not shatter when all that occurred, and I would be amazed, too.Bill
Rod buster is an iron worker that deals with rebar & pt cables.
Main tools, folding rule for the boss, TIE_WIRE_REEL for the workers & a pair of lineman pliers.
Be sure to back charge the SOB when you go to fix it!!
That's usually the plan.
We just started the decks for twin 33 story condo towers & the rodbuster foreman started day one with a whole lot of screaming, I was like hey man we have 60 floors to go, not the way to start out.
Day 2 he was pleasant & we had a good conversation about how were going to get all these decks done on a schedule that has a deck being poured per week per tower.
If they keep the breakage to a minimum & tell me about each one then I doubt I will be doing any back charging.
It's when they get broke or kicked & I have to get an X-ray guy out & core drill a hole after the fact at 500 bucks per pop, then the back charging begins.
There's a lot more work on these decks than I'm used to.
Normally I just have the main sleeves, a few conduits for island sink water supply, but on these two towers we're putting in conduit for 100% water distribution pipe to be in the slab.
We just finished a three story parking garage (the five story condo next to it still has a way to go). Our plan called for three floors worth of conduit for about thirty apartments to go in the topping slab, which is 4" thick. Were talking feeders here, our condiut is about 2" thick. My foreman made the wise choice to drop it in the slab below, which was about 8" thick (I think). We ran over 5000 ft of conduit through the slab only to have an engineer tell us that it all had to come out. We had gone through the proper channels and gotten the OK, so it was quite a shock to have to move everything. We ended up getting special permission (again) but had to space all 5000 ft. of our conduit a minimum of 6" apart. I've not done alot of slab work with my company, so this was a learning experience for me.
Put your head on a swivel, those guys will roll right over the top of you every chance they get.