Thursday, October 30, 2008

API Inquiries

In the past one of the items at the API committee meetings has been the review of inquiries sent in by those of you who had questions concerning some aspect of the API-650, API-653, or API-620 codes. There have been some changes going on that has prevented this from happening or has reduced which inquiries would be reviewed at the committee meeting. After the last meeting I thought this had been worked out so that at this meeting inquiries would once again be considered. In fact the schedule has a time set aside for this. I had submitted several inquires last time and resubmitted them this time anticipating that I would have answers at this meeting. After requesting verification that my inquiries had been received by the right person, I received a reply that said API has changed their requirements once again on how inquiries are to be handled. I am not sure what all this entails but hope to have it explained at the meeting in November. What I do know is that some of the committees accepted this new process and are following it. However, the committee that would be reviewing the inquiries I submitted decided that instead of using the new process they simple would not review or answer inquiries. I do not now where this leaves us. We shall see.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Update on Addendum 1

I have been trying to find out when API-650 11th Edition Addendum 1 was going to be released. I finally got an answer back. They now say it will be released in "November or December". The way it has been going I would say it will be December. It appears that they are trying to clean up some of the typo errors that exist as well as adding the changes. I think they had a lot more of the committee checking over what they were putting into the addendum. In the process they made a lot of corrections which meant it had to go back to the editors and be revised and rechecked. Hopefully there will be very few errors they will need to be corrected after it is released. As far as Addendum 2, they have not indicated any date. Just that it will be next year. We may have a better idea when we get to the API meeting in a few weeks. I will keep you posted.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

API-650 11th Edition Addendum 1

It has been a while since I posted. I will be trying to correct this in the future. First, there have been many questions concerning when Addendum 1 to the 11th Edition will be released. We are all still asking that question. I have asked API and am waiting for a reply. It might be November but we shall see. At the April meeting we were told that Addendum 2 would be released by the end of this year. Who knows, maybe Addendum 2 will be released before Addendum 1! I will be attending the API committee meetings in early November. By then we should have some type of answer.

I have submitted a series of inquires to API to try to get answered at this next meeting in November. After the meeting I will let you know what the results are of these inquires.

With regard to our software, ITSdesign, we have made several revisions to the program. An addition was made to allow you to enter additional wind moments and wind shears. We have added IPE, IPN, and HEA beam shapes to our SI database. We have also corrected some beam weight problems in the SI database. With regard to seismic designs, we have added a checkbox for entering "Peak Ground Acceleration" and values for "Q" to accomodate seismic areas not covered by ASCE7. Other minor corrections have also been done.

In my next post I will comment on some more of the changes that supposedly are coming in Addendum 1.