North America’s Tallest Wood Building to Be Built in Quebec

October 8, 2015 Shane Hedmond

The Origine Condominium Complex.  Rendering courtesy of Nordic Structures — The Origine Condominium Complex. Rendering courtesy of Nordic Structures

Buildings have been made with wood for thousands of years, but those buildings rarely make it above a couple stories high. Due to building codes and requirements, non-combustible materials like concrete and steel are required to be used in most commercial buildings. Typical timber buildings, like many North American houses will easily burn in the right conditions, but more and more projects are using cross-laminated timber (CLT) which has excellent non-combustion properties

Amazing Excavator Attachment Combines Digging and Hammering in One Machine

October 7, 2015 Shane Hedmond

During excavations, we typically hope we run into mostly “soft stuff,” that easy to remove dirt that lets us get our work done quickly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go exactly like that a lot of the time, whether you run into a large rock that needs broken up or a huge chunk of concrete gets in the way. When that happens, you either need to change attachments or have another piece of heavy machinery to get the job done. A Texas business man decided there had to be a better way, so he did something about it.

Virginia Tech Engineers Develop New Safety Vest That Could Save Lives

October 5, 2015 Shane Hedmond

Construction sites are some of the most dangerous places in the world. Couple a job site with the general public and they’re disasters waiting to happen. According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, 579 people were killed in highway work-zone related accidents in just 2013 alone. Professor Tom Martin and Kristen Hines, engineers at Virginia Tech, hope to greatly reduce that number with their recent development of a smart safety vest that gives several seconds of warning to workers if danger is approaching.

New App Helps You Determine the Risk of Plastic Concrete Shrinkage

October 2, 2015 Shane Hedmond

Concrete, the most widely used building material in the world, can be very temperamental in certain weather conditions. Due to its poor tensile strength, concrete is almost always certain to crack, but professionals do their best to reduce the size and delay their appearance. A new app is hoping to reduce the risk of concrete, plastic shrinkage by monitoring weather patterns.

Watch this Permeable Concrete “Drink” 1,000 Gallons of Water in a Minute

October 1, 2015 Shane Hedmond

As California and several other states have recently found out, water conservation is a huge deal to resident’s quality of life and the environment’s overall health. Allowing water to drain naturally is a huge part of keeping our aquifers filled with water, but our roadways and parking surfaces are mostly impermeable surfaces, causing us to redirect rainfall unnaturally into drains and sewers. Sudden and large amounts of rainfall in a short period of time can lead to extremely hazardous conditions, like flooding.

SleeveNotes Lets You Take Notes Right on Your Sleeve

September 28, 2015 Shane Hedmond

In the age of high technology wearables, like smart watches, glasses, and helmets, there are many in the construction industry who long for days past, when the only piece of technology they had to use, other than their tools, was a pencil and a pad of paper. We recently showed you some great phone apps to store your job site notes on, but after many of you told us that you still use pencil and paper, we decided to get a little more primitive for you.

Milwaukee’s ONE-KEY Inventory Management Released: Here’s How to Use It

September 21, 2015 Shane Hedmond

Back in August, Milwaukee Tool announced their new tool tracking software, ONE-KEY, would soon be released. On Friday, Milwaukee made good on their promise and released the Inventory Management portion of the software. Here are some helpful videos that show you how to use it.

Use a 20V Battery on Your 18V DeWalt Tools With This Handy Adapter

September 18, 2015 Shane Hedmond

It’s pretty frustrating to invest heavily in a nice set of tools, only to have the technology become outdated before the end of their useful life. For those of you who hopped on board the 18V DeWalt Tool train, there’s now an opportunity for you to use the latest and greatest 20V battery with most of them.

Before You Buy Another iPad for Your Construction Project...

September 11, 2015 William Lucus

Tablets have been finding their way into construction Project Managers' hands for a while now. With applications like Bluebeam, ProCore, and PunchPro, the use of iPads and tablets have become more common place and necessary. Currently, many Project Managers have a laptop or desktop PC and then carry an iPad for punch list during site visits.

Drone Being Used for Progress Tracking on Sacramento Kings’ New Stadium Construction

September 3, 2015 Shane Hedmond

Drone footage of the Golden 1 Center construction, video below.

Typically, progress tracking on a job site involves a supervisor walking around a job site with a note pad and a camera, but technology is slowly changing the way that process is being done. Drones have been all the rage in construction recently and a team of contractors and software developers have made them an ultra-powerful tool, but some workers are not too thrilled about it.