Hi, I thought I would open up a more generic question.
How do you model and measure excavation for pricing purposes? We often underpin existing buildings to lower the basements. This involves digging out under foundations, casting new foundation walls, excavating the centre mass, and then casting a new concrete slab at a lower level to create taller basements. I can quantify the volume of material excavated for the foundation walls using the volume of concrete for new footings plus bulking factors, but this leaves the centre mass, which is an excavation from the existing floor slab down to the required excavation level. I have not been able to make a BIM component that quantifies this. The same applies to gravel below the new concrete slab; how do I create that?
They Gareth, It’s a great question, sounds like you do a bit of custom work.
My suggestion would be to use what you can inside the magic tools of Plus Design Build.
A couple of ways to approach it.
#1 Probably the most glitch proof way would be to create a new material under the “Floor Tool “ – Slab tool, that tool creates volumes automatically and then you could also duplicate the same drawn volume as the concrete also. You would have capacity to address depth and widths also.
I use this tool for blue metal/aggregate/as well as one off excavation. For all our jobs we just associate the linked recipe to our concrete material applicable.
You could also create a recipe that links directly to a concrete material that you draw e.g the concrete for under pining and associate an excavation material recipe so it automatically works it out as the same, then just add wastage accordingly.
#2
The only other way you could play around with the room set out and Quantities tool (which also measures volume) and replicate the entity info in the default tray to be identical to the sample one drawn straight from the tool from PlusSpec.
Hi Mitch, option 1 works just fine; thanks for the tip. I still don’t understand what the BIM objects are supposed to do regarding quantification other than a simple count. it would seem like a good tool to draw with, put in the model, and then do a takeoff and add it to the BOQ, but I can’t get it to work like that.
What is the size tab for? After clicking the unit of measure? it does something that will alter the volumes, but the actual value makes no sense, so I don’t follow
