Where a portal frame earns its place
A portal frame is the ordinary answer for a clear-span shed: a factory, a feed mill, a retail unit, a warehouse. The rafters and columns act together, so the span does not need internal columns in the way a simple beam and column layout often does. For a local builder putting up an industrial unit, that is usually the whole conversation. For a developer, it is the frame that lets the building let.
It is not the right frame for every building. Multi-storey residential and city-centre alterations are more often beam and column, sometimes with a mezzanine cut into an existing structure. The project library shows both. United Feeds in Dungannon and Mash Direct in Comber are industrial frames. Methodist College and Cornmarket are tighter, urban steel.
What moves the steel package
Span, height, and anything hung from the frame. A crane beam, a mezzanine, a heavy services zone or a high eaves for racking changes the tonnage more than the cladding colour does. So does the site. A greenfield unit off the M1 is a different erection from a lane behind a Belfast street.
Cost follows tonnage, connections, coatings and how many times the steel has to be handled. An honest budget needs the general arrangement, not a footprint sketched in an email. If the building also needs an internal floor, price the mezzanine and metal decking with the frame. Splitting them creates two programmes.
Programme, from Dunmurry to site
The works are in Dunmurry, five miles from Belfast and minutes from the M1, which is why so much of the Northern Ireland work can be fabricated and delivered without a long haul. Fabrication is cutting, drilling, welding and priming against the site date. Erection is our own team, with a charge hand talking to your foreman.
Send the drawings, the specification and the date you need steel on site. Estimating in Dunmurry will tell you whether the slot is real.