Welcome to Ask the Pole Barn Guru – where you can ask questions about building topics, with answers posted on Mondays. With many questions to answer, please be patient to watch for yours to come up on a future Monday segment. If you want a quick answer, please be sure to answer with a “reply-able” email address.
Email all questions to: PoleBarnGuru@HansenPoleBuildings.com
DEAR POLE BARN GURU: Are your buildings as good as a Lester Building? SLIVERS IN CEDAR RAPIDS
DEAR SLIVERS: I like to think of it as, “Is a Lester Building as good as a Hansen Pole Building”?
I personally know many of the management team of Lester Buildings, they are good folks and build a quality building. They do NOT specialize in providing easy to construct pole building kit packages for the average DIY consumer.
If you are looking to do some or all of the work yourself, our Construction Manual with its over 400 pages of descriptions, drawings and actual photos of every step of the construction process is nothing short of artwork. No one else offers anything like it.
Many of the great features of Lester Buildings are going to be the same as what we offer. There are going to be some significant differences which, in my humble opinion, make our buildings superior, to any other pole building kit, Lester’s or otherwise.
All of our engineered non-commercial building kits come with a Limited Lifetime Warranty. You’ll not find this anywhere else.
We do not believe in the use of concrete cookies, for good reason. Read why here: https://www.hansenpolebuildings.com/blog/2012/08/hurl-yourconcrete-cookies/
Other than in very narrow column spacings, “barn girts” do not engineer out: https://www.hansenpolebuildings.com/blog/2012/03/girts/.
Hansen Pole Buildings uses “bookshelf” style girts in most instances.
We tested the industry “standard” painted screws for attaching steel roofing and siding and found, they didn’t work! See why here: https://www.hansenpolebuildings.com/blog/2012/08/this-is-a-test-steel-strength/
So we took the specially designed “diaphragm screw” and had them powder coated! This means no paint to chip off.
Lester Buildings are typically designed with sidewall columns every ten feet for non-engineered buildings and eight feet for engineered buildings. The Hansen Pole Buildings double truss system, allows for a standard sidewall column spacing of 12 feet with the ability to go even wider. This affords wider door openings, without the need for costly (or space consuming) structural door headers.
Hansen Pole Buildings utilizes 2×6 and larger roof purlins (for spans over eight feet), hung between the trusses using engineered Simpson hangers, not smaller purlins over the tops of single trusses, relying upon a six inch long screw driven the long direction through a 2×4 on edge and into the top of a truss.
In summary – if you like a Lester Building, you should love your new Hansen Pole Building.
