Structural Steel, Pipe Racks & Truss Systems
A structural steel frame is the skeleton of columns and beams that holds a building up. Masas designs, fabricates and erects frames for warehouses, workshops, showrooms, stores and plant buildings.
Drawings or a written scope is enough to price it.
Structural Steel Frames
What happens inside the building decides where the columns go and how heavy the steel is.
In the Masas record, a workshop for Truck & Crane has headroom and doors set by the tallest machine that enters. Two service centres for NBK were built to each manufacturer’s own standard as well as the local code.
Structural Steel Frames
It is the set of steel columns, beams and bracing that carries the roof, the walls and everything inside the building down to the foundations. The roof and wall sheeting, the floors and the doors are all fixed to it, so its layout shapes the whole building.
There are two ways to build one. A pre-engineered frame repeats one standard shape along the building and suits a plain rectangular shed. A conventional frame is designed piece by piece, which suits buildings with an irregular shape, heavy equipment or a mix of uses under one roof. Masas builds both.
A frame can also extend a building that is already in use. The Masas record includes an extension to an aluminium extrusion plant, tied into the existing structure while production continued, and a factory extension tied into a working battery production building.
Warehouses and distribution stores
Workshops, showrooms and vehicle service centres
Mezzanine floors and the access steel serving them
Extensions to buildings that stay in use
Before you decide
Each of these is cheap to settle on paper and expensive to change once the steel is made.
A column in the wrong place blocks an aisle, a service bay or a door. Fixing the floor layout first lets the column grid follow it. The wider the space between columns, the heavier each beam has to be, so only ask for the width the use needs.
A mezzanine, a hoist, heavy machinery or equipment such as a simulator puts weight at particular points. The frame has to be designed for it from the start. On a training simulation building in the Masas record, the equipment set the structure, not the usual occupancy.
Joining new steel to an existing building means checking what the old structure can carry and planning work around the people still using it. Drawings of the existing building, and the hours when work is possible, change both the design and the programme.
Plain terms
These terms appear on almost every steel frame package. Knowing them makes a quotation easier to compare.
Masas runs the same five stages on every frame package, grouped here into four.
01
Masas reads the drawings and confirms in writing what the price covers, whether design, fabrication, erection or only part of that, before a quotation is issued.
02
Shop drawings, a method statement, an inspection and test plan and a risk assessment go to your consultant, who checks them against QCS 2014, Qatar’s construction specification.
03
Steel in the grade the design specifies is cut, welded to AWS standards and given its protective coating in the Masas workshop, then inspected against the approved plan.
04
The frame is erected in the order agreed with the main contractor, set plumb and straight so the cladding fits. Snagging, as-built drawings and certificates close the package.
For a quotation
Architectural drawings, plus how the floor will be used: racking, vehicle routes, service bays or machines. The layout tells the designer where columns can go.
Anything the frame must carry besides the roof: a mezzanine, a hoist, heavy machines, services hanging from the steel, or a manufacturer’s building standard.
If the new steel joins an existing building, send its drawings and say whether it stays in use during the work.
Whether you need design, supply, erection or all three, and the project specification for coating and galvanising if one already exists.
Record
Contract values are not published. Scale is stated in area and clear span.
Design, fabrication and erection supervision of a combined warehouse and showroom — the largest single design-and-build package in the completed record.
View projectDesign, fabrication and erection of a combined showroom and workshop — a glazed public frontage on one side of the same frame as a working service bay.
View projectEngineering, fabrication and erection of two manufacturer-branded service centres. A marque service centre is built to the manufacturer's own standard as well as to the local code, and the steel has to satisfy both.
View projectEngineering, fabrication and erection of a workshop sized for truck and mobile crane maintenance — the headroom and the door openings are set by the tallest machine that has to get inside.
View projectFabrication and erection of the structural steel for a 4,000 square metre warehouse in the Old Industrial Area. A retail distribution store lives or dies on its clear floor: the frame is set out to keep the bays open for racking and the door heights clear for vehicles.
Fabrication and erection of the structural steel for a 1,200 square metre warehouse at Birkat Al Awamer. A single-span shed of this size is priced on its tonnage and erected in days; the value Masas adds is getting the frame plumb and the purlin lines true, so the cladding contractor is not correcting steel.
Engineering, fabrication and erection of a ground-plus-mezzanine steel store. The mezzanine level carries its own framing and access steel.
View projectEngineering, fabrication and erection supervision for a simulation building, where the structure carries equipment loads set by the simulator rather than by ordinary occupancy.
View projectThe other parts of this service, each on its own page with its own evidence.
Send drawings or a scope and we will come back with a quotation.
