Status Scope of services. Nothing on this site is a record of completed work.

Material handling

Conveyor galleries, transfer towers, chute and bin support and crane runways — structures loaded by machinery rather than by people.

Alignment, not just capacity
Designing before the vendor data lands
Crane runways are their own problem

Continuous line: Issued Dashed line: By others Leader line: Refers to

Sample load envelope, tolerance band and fatigue curve, generated for this site. Schematic, no values. Not a Seimora project.

A material handling structure is a machine mount that happens to be made of steel. Its loads are dynamic, repeated millions of times, and defined by a vendor whose general arrangement drawing usually arrives after the structure has had to start. Deflection limits are set by what the equipment will tolerate rather than by what a person would notice, and they are often an order of magnitude tighter.

Alignment, not just capacity

A conveyor gallery that is strong and out of alignment does not work. Camber, pre-set, erection tolerance and how the structure is surveyed after erection belong in the drawings, because a tolerance that only exists in a specification is a tolerance nobody has been asked to achieve.

Designing before the vendor data lands

Where the equipment is not yet selected, the structure is designed against a stated envelope of loads and the envelope is printed on the drawings. When the vendor data arrives it is checked against that envelope, and the check either closes the item or raises a change — but it is a check against something written down, not against somebody's recollection of what was assumed.

Crane runways are their own problem

Runway beams are a fatigue problem, a tolerance problem and a connection problem simultaneously, and the connection detail at the rail and at the column is where most runway trouble originates. It is worth designing rather than adopting.