Acrow Props

[blackers123]

My project is to hold up the existing 1960s renovation under my house. The outside walls and one internal wall gets taken out and strip footings get dug. Question is how many acro props do I use? 1 ever metre or what?

[journeyman Mick]

Be very Careful! Besides taking downward loads the walls also provide lateral bracing (ie prevent the house from falling over sideways). If you remove all the walls and replace them with acrow props it might still tip over and kill you and anyone else nearby.

Generally you would prop and then remove a section of wall, place new footings, build new support structure and fix to house then repeat. Do you really need to do this yourself? You may be better off working and making money in order to pay someone with the required skills and knowledge to complete at least the structural parts of this process for you.

Prop spacing would depend on the construction of the house, bearer spacings, room required for excavation etc etc etc.

Mick

[blackers123]

Should have given more detail !
The front half of the house will be levelled and reblocked on concrete stumps. The back half, I will support 1 quarter and excavate the outside while interior walls remain. The engineer/project manager will supervise this. One of my tasks was to work out prices on the project and the support is one of those elements. So i wanted to work out how many props per square meter/lineal meter and then decide whether to hire or buy and resell later. Your thoughts?

[Dirty Doogie]

Always a tricky call without seeing the job. Generally bearers are propped up by a heavy timber with an acrow prop each end.

The timber "pin" is often coach screwed through the head plate of the acrow prop, and the foot of the acrow prop is fixed to a firmly levelled piece of timber plate on the ground. so if the job is holding up bearers where a post once existed - then you'll need 2 acrow props in the position of every existing stump.

There are 3 sizes of acrow prop (probably more) based on height - to buy them new , the price doubles at each size up (It might be different now - I bought mine 10 years ago). But even then size 2 acrows were $150 - today $150 will hire you 5 acrows for a month.

they are also buggars of things to have lying around the place.