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Wednesday 12 August 2015

The New Buildings


London's skyline is constantly changing! Lots of new buildings with funny names popping up everywhere.  Cheese Grater, Walkie Talkie, Razor, Can of Ham and so on.  How would Kirkcaldie view these buildings do you suppose?  (see yesterday's post)

The Cheese Grater ran into problems earlier this year when a bolt (when I say bolt I'm talking serious bolt, the size of an arm type bolt) fell 15 stories to the ground.  Within the space of three months three bolts suffered the same fate.  It appears the bolts failed due to something called "hydrogen embrittlement".  This was explained to me as tiny wee hydrogen protons racing through the steel creating havoc until it explodes.

Not a good look.  The building has 3,000 of these bolts in it.  All of which will need to be replaced at an estimated cost of £6 million.

In recent weeks we have learned the same bolts have been used in the new American Embassy building.  Yep, the same problem.

What do you think Kirkcaldie would have said?

8 comments:

Stefan Jansson said...

That they should have tested the bolts with his machine. Scary stuff. Someone needs to set up shop and sell helmets to passersby!

Anonymous said...

Before building it has to be undergone several checking since it is a major project. Scary news...

Adullamite said...

What a mess the city now is.

Sharon said...

I think he would have thought he could have found the problem long before the building was built.

William Kendall said...

Heads must roll, figuratively speaking, for that one.

Anonymous said...

It has become a very modern looking skyline... and who thinks up those names?!

Gunn said...

I guess my old book about LONDON seen from the air, is out of date soon.

Lots of work.... and an awful lot of money!

Nice interesting image!

Jack said...

Gee, I always thought London was pretty cool already.

Those bolts? Ugh. Sometimes when architects and engineers want something very unusual, they push the limits of knowledge and encounter embarrassing and expensive and sometimes dangerous problems like this. In Boston, the John Hancock tower was a glass wall building designed by I. M. Pei in the 1970s, and unfortunately it kept losing huge glass panels. It was quite dangerous, but they finally figured out how to install them safely.

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