Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Here's My Smokestack

You Want Some Fries With That???


I was just wondering how I could present one of my AutoCAD drawings here on the blog, so I did a little fiddling around.

It was actually pretty easy. I just copied the image to the clipboard, then pasted it into Photoshop and saved it as a JPEG file.

Here, take a peek at what I've been designing:


This image is the assembled elevation view of a 115 foot tall, 9'-2" diameter exhaust stack that will be delivered this fall to a company out in California. It will weigh about 53 thousand pounds when erected.

That's a little over 25 tons for those of you that graduated from the University of Georgia.

There's also a platform around it there near the middle and an eighty foot high ladder running up the side for the adventuresome and/or athletic employees to climb when they feel like it.

This design is a relatively small structure as stacks go. The biggest I ever produced was 300' tall (again...thirty stories for the UGA crowd) and weighed in at over a quarter of a million pounds.

Actually we're building not one but TWO identical stacks for this customer, and we hope to build another design for the Sea Ray boat company down in Florida later this year.

In a past life I did this kind of work every day, and in addition to sitting on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Steel Stack Standards Committee, I've designed and built a little over four hundred of these type structures over the past 25 years.

All in all the process is B O R I N G, but hey...it helps pay the bills...so what the heck?

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