Yeah, "fun" in quotation marks for sarcastic purposes.
The company owner nearly lost his ass on that project. It was originally designed by the Disney "Imagineers" as a tensile structure, meaning that in the original design, everywhere you see those steel triangular trusses in between the poles, there were tensioned steel cables and the tops of the poles had tensioned steel cables running back to this large 36" diameter steel disk that we fabricated, then cut into the roof of the building and welded in place.
Fine.
Only problem was that these "Imagineers" didn't take into account that if you're going to apply tension to steel poles in one direction, you have to apply equal tension in the other direction. Which would've meant have tensioned steel cables fastened to the concrete plaza in front of the building where all the people were walking.
The structural engineer who did all of our engineering work wouldn't sign off on the cables in one direction and another one we had used before up in NJ wouldn't either. Disney wasn't about to put tensioned cables in a guest walkway.
So I spent weeks redrawing it with each new idea they came up with, all to no avail. Finally, one of our sales guys who had an engineering degree that he never used for anything other than industrial product sales jobs, came up with the idea of the triangular trusses.
It met the criteria Disney's design dept wanted which was small diameter "light weight" look and they even enhanced the "futuristic" look more than the original cable design.
They were hap-hap-happy boys!!!!
Our problem was, by the time we all agreed on that, we were running out of time and the contract had a late penalty clause that held them not responsible even if it was their doing.
We completed the job on the very last day before the late penalty kicked in.
Plus, we did two other structures in the same general area at the same time.
One of them was this "gazebo" thing, but without the big sign which was added later...
That was one busy ass summer. LOTS of overtime for everyone!!!
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