In the old Morrisons (just a bit before my time) when we were owned by the Morrison family there were two Ian Raes, one was sales and one was techy. I never knew this appellation applied to Ian Rae (techy) until a few months ago when I visited a Tarmac quarry that Morrisons used to own and I was having the crack with the guys.
Well Ian Rae (techy) hung up his boots at the end of June 09 (metaphorically), as Ian will wear them till they have holes in them, not that he is tight, it’s just to get …
Jun 29th by Ian under Materials and Construction
Tags: amey, bear, road maintenance, whitelee wind farm
I was in good time, having left Whitelee wind farm at 12.30 where for you road techies we are laying blacktop on a floating road, designed by several heads and road note 29, yes road note 29. Without fuss or hindrance got back to the m74 to travel south to Locherbie, when after junction 6 met solid traffic doing that stop starting shuffle. Radio Scotland informed me there was a breakdown on the south bound and traffic was building up, aye, right it was, 4/5 miles of it! there was several breakdowns in the hard shoulder, probable over heating as …
May 10th by Ian under Materials and Construction, Miscellaneous, Travels, my Friends travels
Tags: game food, guinea fowl, HD 26 01, Marchbank hotel
Our, not design and build, A7 project is nearing completion, and I have to do falling weight defectometer (FWD) top of base and top of binder for designer validation. The design is HD 26/01 and uses figure 2.2, so the design is material choice and thickness. Not stiffness, so how does the designer validate his design? and how does he validate his design on a part built pavement that generally is still warm, but below 30 degrees C? It also occurred to my “catch up brain”, that the temp is recorded by drilling into the pavement to 100mm. I do …
construction shots from April 2009…
Believe it or not I captured these images on the site of the new M74 at Polmadie, although I suspect the wildlife at night may be somewhat different.…
Apr 9th by Ian under Materials and Construction
I was at a pavement meeting this week for a road tender project. These meetings never used to happen, as the choice was blacktop of what thickness (except DBFOs) and the market place used to sort that out, usually after an award. As the rules are new in HD 26/06 and the now much clearer IAN 73/06, 2009 update, there is a part of the meeting that is educative. It’s not that its complicated to understand as you still end up with thicknesses of layers, it’s the choice that complicates. In this choice matrix are grey areas, the largest is …
Feb 4th by Ian under Materials and Construction
Well you must have come across them, the criticisers, those who have a knowledge of the rules but not the activity. Usually they are in the control line, the purse string command line. As I referred golden rule in a previous post, he who has the gold, rules. They’re not really “jobs worths” usually well meaning, even thoughtful, helpful when it suits but lapse to criticism when the rule book cannot be obeyed. And sometimes it cannot be obeyed. Because the rule book does not apply to a current problem or covers all aspects of problems that it should.
English …
Jan 31st by Ian under Materials and Construction, Travels, my Friends travels
I like Oman, and it’s people, even though when I had to leave within a month when my work permit was not granted, I had 5mins left on my visit visa, at the airport, Mr jobs worth said, your lucky, another five mins and we would have to jail you. Back to Dubai I went.
I was subsequently jailed, but that’s another story.
Anyway I loved Oman, real people, real links to the history of their land, settled they were. I could sense the difference between Dubai, Saudi, Bahrain, and Oman, settled, the folks there had been there a while …
Jan 14th by Ian under Materials and Construction
At the moment the biggest inland windfarm in Europe, built by a JV of Morrison Construction and Balfour Kilpatrick, for the client Scottish Power. There was a talk about it in the Teacher Building in St Enoch square last night. I wasn’t there but it prompted me to google “whitelee windfarm” to see how we were beating our chests at having nearly completed this huge prestigious project. Ten pages later in google, nothing, nada, ziltch. Every man and his dog is featured including a video of a quarry blast on U tube.
My involvement (unknown to me at the time)Â …
Jan 10th by Ian under Materials and Construction, Travels, my Friends travels
The standard of detail is appalling and the bulletin issues never help as it is just overload, then as you find apparent mistakes and dichotomies and TQ them, it jams up the system. Much time is spent not in producing solutions but trying to understand what the client requires.
Jan 6th by Ian under Materials and Construction
Tags: Road capping, stiffness testing, subgrade, type 1
The pavement’s weakest link?
I think so, a survivor from Macadam?, seems to have been around so long that we have become complacent. Before stiffness measurement, performance was a particle size distribution (PSD), frost heave, and the quite strict laying and compaction specification. I should say here to foreign visitors, wish I had some!!, that I refer to the specification for highway works. A monumental work from the UK’s government engineers, a species not often seen walking on subbase, it is written to protect the client (well they write it?) and provide the tax payer with a good for value …
Jan 4th by Ian under Materials and Construction
Higher densities, better physical properties, all civil engineering graduates know this. The specification for highway works has a method specification for general soil compaction and an end of product density for special fills. Now special fills that require density measurements are generally those behind structures, with limited space and therefore limited choice of compaction plant, you can begin to understand this, especially as the structure will not move. Where do you feel serious bumps on motorways? generally at structures. So is density measurement working?
The difficulty I approach, is returning to measuring densities on general embankment fill, the method compaction …
Dec 27th by Ian under Materials and Construction
FWD testing
Dec 22nd by Ian under Materials and Construction
Does major industry use QA to hide behind? The cement industry appears to have accomplished this, who in the last 40 years remembers testing cement? we all now receive cement certs as a given, never challenged, well how could you? it’s from a factory like an AUDI car, problem is when we have driven the product we can’t sort out why the brochure product is not as advertised, we consumers of ready mix are the ultimate users, denied as real customers by the suppliers who use the powder, no link to powder maker so door shut. Is cement a hugely …
Dec 22nd by Ian under Materials and Construction
How hard can it be to mix four ingredients to produce a stated outcome? aggregate, cement, water and an admixture (or two) We have probably done three of them around the house with a shovel and a board. I once made a whole patio of slabs with my own formwork with embedded red chips floated into the surface. and the real reason for doing it was to prove a mason wrong, whilst having a pint with him he declared, you will never make them frost resistant! Want a bet, I internally cogitated? I was impressed one of his durability factors …