Successful California truck facility fabrication reveals the potential of building information modeling to aid collaboration
Sharing 3-D frame models elimi- nated potential construction problems on a large truck facility in Mountain Pass, Calif. The collabora- tion of leading steel joist supplier New Millennium Building Systems, Fort Wayne, Ind., and custom metal building manufacturer Garco Building Sys- tems, Airway Heights, Wash., demonstrated that building information modeling (BIM) offers signifi - cant benefi ts to metal building manufacturers and partnering contractors on a typical project.
The 12,600-square-foot truck maintenance
facility was built at a Molycorp Inc. rare earth oxide mine as part of an $895 million expan- sion and modernization project. Garco supplied the framing to Sandy, Utah-based steel erector Sure Steel Inc. Scheduled to be put in service sometime this year, the building is 43 feet tall to accommodate large mine haul trucks, front-end loaders and truck-mounted cranes. The facility is fairly typical of ones in the mining industry for which Garco supplies framing.
In 2010, New Millennium became the fi rst joist
company to offer BIM-based project development by introducing Dynamic Joist design software, the fi rst digital joist design component. Its work with Garco was its fi rst use of 3-D fi le sharing in metal building manufacturing—and this approach boosted the effi ciency of the collaboration signifi cantly. New Millennium used a Tekla Structures
model provided by Garco as its initial joist model. Using proprietary automation tools, New Millen- nium inserted the joists in the model. The tools
24 METAL CONSTRUCTION NEWS July 2012 www.metalconst ruct ionnews.com