Being the person who intercepts a great number of the Technical Support inquiries at Hansen Pole Buildings, I’ve heard this statement more than once – weirdly enough, it is close to 100% of the time from builders. Those who are doing their own work, somehow don’t have this challenge.

Building owners are more likely to contact us and start by saying something like, “I messed up and put screws where they didn’t belong”.  Over the last 13 years, we’ve graciously donated a few screws to these folks.

Back in the early days of these blog articles, I’d written about a particular instance of ‘not enough screws’: https://www.hansenpolebuildings.com/2011/12/stitch-screws/

Now our system is fairly generous with screws. We do realize some get dropped, over used or are misplaced. For screws which are installed in the “field” of steel panels, the screws go next to each high rib. High ribs every nine inches and panels are three feet in width, so this means 4/3 of a screw per every foot of framing. We round up from 1.33 as a multiplier to 1.4 (or 5% extra). We then round up to the nearest 100.

At the eave and ridge, or splash board and end truss top chord on the endwalls, are the highest stress points of the steel diaphragm. At these locations, a screw is placed on each side of every rib, so we use 2.67 and 2.8 for the respective multipliers.

For ridge caps, it takes the same number of screws as at the top of the roof steel panels, so length of ridge times 2.67 is what it takes, and our system uses 2.8 and rounds up to the nearest multiple of 50.

Corner and Rake trims and fascias are attached roughly every three feet, our system uses two feet and again rounds up to the next multiple of 50.

With all of this, Justine (Wizardress of getting your building delivered) had an inquiry today from a builder (surprise) who claimed the title of this article. Of course he swears to Justine he has built everything by the book.

I manually checked the required number of schools, versus what was actually shipped, to find out there was plenty of each, with extras.  My suggestion to Justine – have the builder send photos which clearly depict how he installed the screws.

A picture, is truly worth a thousand words.