sill plate attachment on old construction?

[Jules Richardson]

How were sill plates attached to concrete foundations in older (60 years in this case) construction?

I'm just tearing into a 12' rotted-out section of exterior wall in the workshop and the sill plate is completely shot - but I'm not seeing any signs of how the plate's anchored to the concrete; no J-bolts or wedges. I'm not seeing evidence of wire ties either, although I suppose they might have disintegrated.

Maybe it'll become obvious once I tear the rotted plate out (and hopefully the answer isn't "nothing" ;-) but I probably won't get to that until later today once I've got the structure well supported. I'll put wedges in when I shoe-horn a new plate in...

cheers

Jules

[dpb]

...

The house and barn here (ca 1915) have bolt at corner and roughly 10-12 ft iirc (it's been a while since I paid any attention and I didn't go out and measure since it's currently 106F and climbing :) ). Replaced sill plate on one corner and end of the barn during the restore/reroof; area along the drains in the corner that held the old milking parlor were pretty well gone up a foot or more of studs excepting corner...it had settled an inch or so so raised it all back up to original height and scabbed in under back to solid material...

I don't know what current Code would call for--that will depend on region and whether there's hurricane/earthquake/tornado/other extreme conditions accounted for. We get a tremendous amount of straight wind and the surface area of the barn walls makes for a lot of force and it's been adequate for nearly 100 yr at that...

--

[Harry K]

60 years ago for a shop? Probably nothing. Probably wasn't built to what passed for code in the 40s and was never inspected. May not even have got on on the tax rolls.

Harry K

[Doug]

Check with the local building dept.. They must know the appropriate code to tell you the spacing. My dad built an extension but I just don't recall the spacing of his anchor bolts and even if I did, your code may be different. Of course closer than req'd by code is better in the sense it won't hurt anything but will be considered overkill and cost more.

Now I regret I didn't pay much attention but I was about 12 at the time so I wasn't thinking about construction except for the big pile of lumber he made me carry to the back of the house. The extension doubled the size of the original house so you can imagine the amount of lumber we carried. I think it took us most of the day and I worked for free :(

[DD_BobK]

Sometimes no connection, just the sill placed against wet mud. Maybe some 16d or 20d nails every once in while pressed into the wet mud.

Where is the structure located?

SIngle story? A passable bolting would be 1/2" or 5/8" anchors at 6' o/c and with 12" of ends of sill. More than enough for a "shop" or garage. In your case sounds like about 3 anchors.

cheers Bob