Just What Is Your Business?

Sometimes you just have to get back to the beginning of things before you get a clear view of just what’s going on. This end-of-the-year season is a good time to do that.
As businesses survive, and grow, and prosper they begin to take on lives of their own. Sometimes, five years after the initial [...]

Timely Tuesday Construction News

Power To The People (without more poles): One perennial problem faced by electric power companies is the necessity to upgrade power poles when larger capacity is needed. The weight of larger, and more lines often makes the original poles obsolete. But 3M has come up with a new conductor that is light weight, sag resistant [...]

Monday Morning Mumblings for the Last Monday of 2008

Housing Sales Upturn Predicted for UK: Some promising news comes from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in the UK where housing market surveys predict a 10 percent increase in sales in 2009. That comes on the heels of a 25 percent drop in home values since the peak in 2007 and an anticipated [...]

Establishing Your Construction Brand

To market a construction company using advertising you have to have an ad, and a medium on which the ad travels to the prospective buyer of your product or service. In order to have an ad, you have to know what it is you are trying to do with the advertising.
Some advertising is to build [...]

Space Construction Offers Big View

There is a tendency for us to get an egocentric view of the universe, often seeing ourselves as the center of that phenomena. It isn’t that we are selfish, we have a lot to do just to keep our bodies alive. And so sometimes it’s cool to get the big picture…to get out of the [...]

Restless Builders Turn To Sweet Material During Holiday Downtimes

So, it’s Christmas Eve and your building project, whatever it is, is probably on hold until after the holiday. You’re already tired of the egg nog, there aren’t any bicycles to put together, and your household “to-fix” list is complete. What to do?
Well, there are all kinds of opportunities in building if you use the [...]

Bridges Over Earthquakes

One part of the country’s flirtation with rebuilding its infrastructure could be a new style of bridge in certain locales. Called a flexible bridge, it is engineered to withstand an 8.0 earthquake.
Engineers at the University of Nevada built and tested a 200 ton model that survived 10 seconds of shaking. Its resilience is attributed to [...]

Monday Morning Mumblings for December 22, 2008

Economic Bellweather Shows Cracks: Just a year ago if you bought Caterpillar stock you were flying high as the equipment manufacturer was generating record levels of orders, particularly from overseas interests. In mid April of this year CAT was trading at more than $85. But everything that goes up these days, it seems must come [...]

Housing Industry Sets New Record

I don’t think I saw any headlines heralding the new milestone in the home construction sector. For the first time in 48 years the number of housing permits issued in a given month hit a low of 616,000. The previously closest low was in March of 1975 when it was 709,000.
Depending upon your view this [...]

Architect, Engineer and Builder Christmas Gifts

Any architect worth his or her salt likes to check dimensions as the job progresses. When doing renovation designs getting existing dimensions is where everything begins. So, why not make the measuring easy. The Multi-Measure Combo Pro Electronic Distance Measure Tool by Sonin uses sound waves to get the measurements. It also comes with an [...]