"marson" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Mar 24, 4:51 pm, Rick Blaine wrote:
Tim Smith wrote:
With our Off-Site method, the walls are
assembled into sectional panels just like the On-Site method But the
difference is, with On-Site, the weather and site conditions vary
from day to day causing the walls to be out-of-square and exposed to
rain.

We have an outfit nearby that does something similar. They prebuild all
the
frame walls in a large building, stage the entire building in an empty
field
nextdoor and truck it out to the site. I would think actual site
construction is
just a couple of days rather than a couple of weeks for typical framing.

That obviously means the framing plan needs to be good, but I suspect the
overall cost isn't that much more. Material delivery is about the same,
labor is
the same or less. Quality can be better in a factory than on site.

They typically have a dozen or more buildings being staged, so buisness
must be
good.

I have endured more than one sales pitch for panelized building. It
have seen other builders (usually commercial) using them, and one day
I'd like to try them. But I'm still a skeptic. Basically, what you
are saving yourself is the wall building, which as a percentage of
time spent on a project is very small. You still have to set trusses,
run subfascia, sheath the roof, etc. Although you can frame a
(snip)
and time will tell whether it's the way to go or not. But
framing a house is really a pretty small part of the whole process,
and although it sounds good in a sales pitch, a house is a hell of a
lot more than framing.

As a kid in Indiana 30-some years ago, when lots of big apartment
complexes were going up, a few of them tried the prefab panels. Seems like
an ideal app- 300 to 600 repeats of same basic floor plan. But since even a
short wall gets heavy fast once skin goes on, on a 3-story 4-entrance
apartment building, you end up having to fly them all in with a crane. I
guess they found crane time cost more than carpernter time, becaise within a
few years I never saw it again.

A prefab panel system I might be inclined to ponder would be those foamcore
SIP panels, like they showed on TOH a couple of times. You can't make those
on site.

aem sends....