strengthening timber floor for 350kg weight

May 12, 2007 8 Replies

i have a large accumulator tank (300l) which when full will be approx



350kg. what should i do to strengthen the floor where it will stand.

at the moment the floor is 7"x2" joists resting on bricks on the solum about a metre apart (so its not really suspended). the joists are at



450mm centres. at the moment the tank (empty) is on 18" ply which spans 3 joists.

So in reality IIUC you have a 7x2" spanning 1m, with the added benefit of extra cantilever resistance from the joist the other side of the brick supports.

I would have thought that would be adequate as it is.

In fact, I just plugged the numbers into Superbeam for you....

Ignoring the cantilever, with that sized joist on that span, with the

3.5kN uniform load shared over three of them, you get a worst case deflection of 0.15mm - so *way* inside.

Not quite sure I understood the OP, but if we're talking about a 7x2 spanning 1m, but with effectively clamped ends as opposed to simple supports, then the effective span is halved. Off the top of my head, just by considering what shape the deformed beam adopts. I might sit down and figure out the equations later (or just look it up...).

Hello John

I saw your Google Sketchup project and like many others here was well impressed.

What's Superbeam?

Software for basic steel and timber beam and column design

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original version was written in 1979 (for a Commodore PET) and has been on sale commercially since 1989.

I was about to say Tony will be along shortly to tell you, but I see he beat me to it!

Nice bit of software that will help you either design or c*ck up a set of structural calcs really quickly. The outcome depending on the quality of the information you give it!

The disclaimer on early versions said "If you don't know what you're doing, this program will help you design dangerous structures even more quickly" but I had to remove this on legal advice.

That's the problem with legal advice, makes the world so much duller! ;-)

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