Field Evaluations and Recommendations for Steel Framed Homes (April 1996, 56 p.)
Habitat for Humanity (HFH) in Homestead, Florida started construction in 1995 of a 187 unit community called Jordan Commons. Among the many unique features of this development is the inclusion of cold-formed steel as the framing material for the homes. This HFH project is part of an overall effort to rebuild parts of south Florida damaged by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
With support from AISI and NAHB, builders and others have traveled to the Jordan Commons project to take part in week-long training programs where they get to actually help erect a steel framed house in the course of the training. A research project was developed by the NAHB Research Center under support from HUD to interview builders taking part in this training program to get their reactions to the problems they encountered working with steel framing for the first time. With the cooperation of many tool and fastener manufacturers, the researchers conducting the program were able to identify many problems and issues that could be easily changed in the field. Other problems, which were larger in scale, were brought to the attention of the manufacturers in the form of telephone conversations or through two workshops that were set up by the NAHB Research Center. The HFH site gave the researchers an opportunity to bring the manufacturers together in a "living laboratory."
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