As discussed in Chap. 12, it is sometimes necessary to estimate the value of column reactions before they are available from the metal building system manufacturer. This is a common situation in the competitive bidding process, in which both the manufacturer and the general contractor are selected at the same time. In that situation, the foundations and the anchor rods usually must be designed before the manufacturer is selected and the final column reaction values are available so that a set of contract documents can be produced for all bidders.

To aid the specifiers in this process, the following frame reaction tables are reprinted with permission from the Project and Engineering Manual by Nucor Building Systems. The specifiers are cautioned that these reactions should be considered as preliminary, because other manufacturers will likely have somewhat different numbers. Also, the governing code provisions will likely be different by the time you use these tables. For these reasons and to avoid the unpleasant situation in which the final reactions come in much higher than those assumed in the foundation design, it is prudent to increase the tabulated reactions by a substantial factor.

The following notes are reproduced from the Nucor manual:

The purpose of this section is to provide the column base reactions for a large variety of standard frame geometries for use in foundation design. The defaults used for the variables for the Column Base Reaction Tables are as listed below. Each of the listed variables can be interpolated for non-standard values.