Steel Okay for Commercial Buildings. But For Houses?

What could be easier than _____________ (fill in with any ordinary household project) for a mechanical engineer such as I? ?I’m helping my daughter move into a Walnut Creek house and part of the Dad/engineer help I provide is hanging pictures, mirrors and installing bookshelves. I have my DeWalt driver/drill combo, my electronic stud finder, levels…

But on this day, things are not going to plan. Are my tools failing me? Or is something going on across the Great Water, as Marinites refer to the Bay that separates them from East Bay communities, which includes Walnut Creek?

How else could the stud finder not find studs? How else could my drill not penetrate beyond the drywall where I think a stud might be? Since my stud finder is acting erratically, I have to do a little exploratory drilling. I am not proud of having to make a horizontal row of holes 1 inch apart. It’s certainly not my best work and I hope my Dad/Engineer license to help is not revoked. When the drill does not pop through after encountering only drywall, it goes no further. I am stymied. Obviously, I have hit something impenetrable. I am thinking of the plates framers adding to studs to protect the wiring. To test my theory, I will do more exploratory drilling, this time to make a column of holes. Nope, that wasn’t it. Every hole on the vertical column hits something impenetrable.

Only then does an image from long ago come into focus, one with a building supported with sheet metal formed into structural members being used instead of where 2 X 4 would ordinarily have been. It was a commercial building, though. Surely, they are not using these in my daughter’s house.

But it was the only explanation. I may have discovered cold-formed steel construction – though in the way Columbus discovered America, “discovering,” as it were, what everyone in the construction trades was already well aware of. But just as Europeans knew nothing of “The New World,” mechanical engineers knew nothing of steel construction in residential construction. We MEs, just like the public at large, know only of construction in our homes (that which is “stick-built,” or wood that is perfectly drillable) or have been mesmerized at job sites, watching giant cranes hoisting steel in the form of I-beams.

But cold-formed steel, AKA CFS, is a new thing, at least for us MEs. With the advent of modular construction, CFS has found increasing favor. Read more about how one company is supplying a software solution for it on ENGtechnica: https://engtechnica.com/framecad-launches-nexa-for-cold-formed-steel-framing-projects/