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Contractors know their concrete slab will only perform as well as the reinforcement beneath it. But how much rebar will you need for a small to mid-size slab pour? There’s no easy, quick answer. It depends on a lot of things — the slab’s exact size, thickness, intended use, soil conditions, and ...

Reinforcing steel consumes a lot of labor for contractors, even before concrete can be placed. Your crew has to cut, bend, stage, position, and tie rebar assemblies — potentially a ton of them (or several tons). On large-scale commercial projects, this tedious work can stretch into weeks of time ...

Contractors might hear “fabrication” and “pre-assembly” used interchangeably in discussions about reinforcing steel. However, they are not the same service.

We get a lot of repeat questions on orders of reinforcing steel. A few of these may be familiar (or even on your own mind): How much rebar do you actually need? Is it sold by the ton or by the piece? How long will fabrication take? What information does a fabricator need before production starts?

Do you need to care about weight? How big an issue is corrosion? Is transportation an issue? These are the sorts of questions that estimators ask themselves when they’re weighing a fiberglass rebar vs. steel decision. The material swap can look straightforward on paper. It’s all rebar, right? ...

Rebar paces your job site. Concrete reinforcement comes before the pour — nothing else can move forward until that first step of structural work is complete.

A welding project on reinforcing steel may seem pretty straightforward. You strike an arc, fuse the bars, move on. It’s steel, right? It can be welded. In practice, however, the question isn’t just whether it can be welded, but whether it’s qualified to be welded under code requirements.

Estimators will often encounter epoxy coated rebar while reviewing projects that expect high exposure to moisture or road salt. At first glance, the decision may seem straightforward: if corrosion is a concern, specify epoxy.

A trifecta of challenges — labor shortages, tighter schedules, and rising jobsite complexity — are changing how contractors approach reinforced concrete work. Across the industry, teams are starting to move away from cutting, bending, and tying everything on site. They’re instead turning to rebar ...

Contract drawings are big picture; they tell you what a structure will become. Rebar shop drawings show exactly how to assemble the reinforcing structure.