Pole barn shop/garage help

You could stockpile materials if you have the space, but you would minimize costs if you have all the dirt-moving in one visit of the backhoe (presuming you don't have your own.)

Also, the posts are usually inside the baseboards. You need to keep them dry permanently.

Alternatively, accumulate the funds and have Morton do it!

Do the poles first, then form around them. It's quite easy, then, to use stringers to build your external walls. Better, even, to use square posts. They're a bit more expensive than used power poles, but worth the price in the finished quality and ease of construction for the rest of the structure. By the time you've finished scarfing round posts for the rim beams, you'll wish you'd used square ones.

LLoyd

You'd better do some leveling if you intend to use loose gravel for the floor. Gravel 'slumps', and will put pressure on the boards to the point they'll spring outward some. The higher part of the pile will exert more outward force than the lower parts.

The optimum solution there is to either have the gravel extend well outside the walls, so it slumps outside the building, or to pour reinforced concrete curbs to contain the gravel. In any case, the sub-grade MUST taper down away from your walls to prevent water intrusion.

LLoyd

LLoyd beat me to it but it bears reinforcing: graded drainage is absolutely essential if you don't want your building to become inadvertently 'portable' in only a few years. The other dirt-moving is digging holes; having done them both by hand and by back-hoe-mounted auger I can definitely say the auger is better!

x-no-archive:yes

What do you mean "portable"?

Cant I raise the floor with gravel. After the build> Lloyd E. Sp>

What do you mean "portable"?

Cant I raise the floor with gravel. After the build> Lloyd E. Sp>

The posts rot off at ground level and the wind can pick it up and move it a ways before it racks and folds.

You have to make both surface and sub-surface water move away from the building, making an "island" of dry dirt for the posts and the floor. The dry dirt is actually the structural foundation, just like in a McAdam road.

That is great. My Dad didn't get one until after I went off to school - go figure! I can still remember just how my hands and shoulders felt, after many years.

Get yourself a copy of Mortoh's owner/construction manual and read it cover to cover. It contains useful information.

As for posts. Morton uses 6x6 posts built up from 2x6s spiked together. From what the Morton gut told me they learned the hard way that waterproofing treatment only penetrates about 2". They ended up eating a bunch of buildings some years back when the posts rotted in the ground.

A few things abut their poles. The part that goes into the ground is made up of three 2x6s cut to different lengths. The center is longest, one side is about a foot shorter than the center, the other side about two feet shorter. They then drill a 1/2" hole throuth the stack about 6" from the bottom and insert a metal pin about a foot long to help ahchor the post in concrete. IIRC they drilled the holes about five feet deep with a tractor-mounted auger about a foot in diameter. They then dump a bag of quick setting Sacrete into the bottom of the hole. The 6x6 pole is then dropped into the hole and another bag of Sacrete is added. The concrete is dry. The hole is then filled with dirt. Ground moisture is allowed to moisten the concrete. The crew then sets up a laser level in the center of the building and all the posts are marked and cut off so that the tops are all level (this may result in different heights above grade if your floor isn't level). This allows the factory to make all the posts the same height. The posts shipped from the factory are "keyed" to make a finger joint with the part set in concrete.

Watching one of Morton's crews put up a building is quite an education.They really should make up a time-lapse movie of one going up. It would make some really great advertising on their WEB site. My building is 30x70 with

For my shop, we set the posts and poured the slab at the same time.

It was about 30' x 30', with a 15' lean-to on the back. Nice sized shop! But a couple of airplanes fills it up quickly.

Steel!

Weld on 10 inch purlins for the side "roof gables".

Screw the roof on and - wala - shade!

Took four guys two days.