The exercises in this book are designed to help you learn about materials and methods of construction by involving you in the kinds of work that building design professionals--architects, engineers and drafters--do everyday in the course of designing buildings and getting them built. You will find that these exercises make it easier to learn the essential information in the accompanying text, Fundamentals of Building Construction. You will also discover that they will give you a good start toward becoming proficient in many different phases of building activity.

These exercises are intended to be hand drafted. Even as drawing production increasingly relies on computer aided technology, the skills you develop in these exercises--to conceptualize and develop building assemblies with confidence and ease--remain fundamental. You may draw freehand or with the aid of a drafting board and instruments, as your teacher directs. In either case, no architect's scale is necessary because you can scale your drawing by using the squares of the printed grid and the scale designation provided for each exercise.

The format for the below examples is Adobe's Acrobat pdf. As such, they are meant to exactly mimic the printed exercises; thus you use them to print out a high quality paper form. You will need to have Acrobat Exchange or Reader in order to use these forms. You can download a free copy of the Acrobat Reader from Adobe's Web Site (click the "Get Acrobat" button). Versions are available for just about every computer platform out there (sorry Amiga owners!).

As there are many browsers out there, it is difficult to go into too great a detail about any one; generally you need to first inform your browser that there is a new type/subtype, then you need to "show" it where the Acrobat application is located, and finally that files of this type use an extension called "pdf". More specific information geared to several browsers can be found at Adobe's WWW Acrobat configuration page.

Please click on an exercise below for an example.

> Steel Structural Shapes

> Steel Framing Plans

> Detailing Steel Connections

> Steel Frame Design Exercise

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