Look, I'm not an engineer. I'm the guy who places the orders for structural steel beams and hopes the numbers on the page match the metal that shows up on the truck. After seven years handling procurement for a mid-sized commercial builder in the Pacific Northwest, I've made enough mistakes to fill a small notebook—and, unfortunately, a decent-sized waste bin with scrapped steel.
My experience is based on roughly 150 orders for structural steel i beams, plate girders, and custom fabrications, mostly for warehouse and light industrial projects. If you're working on high-rise residential or seismic retrofits, your tolerances and pain points are different. But for standard large metal buildings? This is the stuff that keeps me up at night.
Here are the questions I wish I'd asked before the first order went out. Each one is tied to a specific mistake I made, with a dollar amount attached.
