Buildings we have designed and supplied.

Two gyms in southwest Missouri and a hunting lodge in the Colorado mountains. Different systems, different problems, and what each building actually needed.

Bolivar, Missouri · Red iron

Tumbles gymnastics facility

85′ × 135′ with a 20′ eave height, fully insulated, in our home town.

A gymnastics floor is one of the clearest cases for red iron there is. The building needs eighty-five feet of clear span with nothing standing in the middle of it, and enough height above the floor for tumbling and aerial work. A column anywhere inside would have made the building unusable for its actual purpose, and no amount of savings elsewhere would have been worth that.

The frame is grey oxide primed, with cold-formed purlins and girts. The building is insulated throughout with four inches of fiberglass batt, which matters in a space where children are on the floor year round and the heating bill runs against a very large volume of air.

Exterior of the finished Tumbles gymnastics building in Bolivar, Missouri — Finished exterior

Eave wall of the 85 by 135 red iron gymnastics building — Finished exterior

Pagosa Springs, Colorado · Tubular steel

Hunting lodge for an outfitter

50′ × 120′, ladder leg tubular framing, at an elevation where snow load governs the design.

An outfitter needed a lodge that could house guests through the season in country that gets real winter. Fifty feet of width and a hundred and twenty of length, in the San Juans.

This is the project we point to when someone assumes tubular is only for small shops. Ladder leg framing builds the column and rafter as an open truss from the same tube stock, and that configuration carries the width and the snow this building needed without moving to a different structural system. Fifty feet sits at the upper end of what tubular does well, and this is what it looks like when it is the right answer rather than a compromise.

Finished 50 by 120 hunting lodge in Pagosa Springs, Colorado — Finished lodge

Gable end of the completed Pagosa Springs hunting lodge — Finished lodge

Buffalo, Missouri · Tubular steel

Iron Knights Gym

60′ × 120′ in ladder leg tubular, twenty minutes up the road from our Bolivar office.

A gym floor needs the same thing a gymnastics floor does: width with nothing standing in it. Sixty feet of clear span sits at the top of what tubular steel does well, and ladder leg framing is what gets it there — the column and rafter built as an open truss from the same tube stock, carrying more span and more load than a solid leg of the same material.

Set this one beside Tumbles. Both are gyms, both are wide open inside, and they are built in different structural systems — because eighty-five feet and sixty feet sit on opposite sides of a real line. Tubular reached sixty and did it well. Past that, red iron.

Exterior of Iron Knights Gym, a 60 by 120 tubular steel building in Buffalo, Missouri — Finished exterior

Gable end of the Iron Knights Gym building — Finished exterior

Sometimes the customer already knows

Iron Knights came to us from an ad for tubular buildings. The owner of Tumbles knew he wanted red iron before he ever called. Neither one needed us to talk him through the choice.

What mattered was that we could supply either. Most companies in this business carry one system, which means the recommendation a customer gets is the product that company happens to sell. We carry all three. So when you already know what you want, you get it — and when you do not, the answer is not decided in advance by what is in our catalog.

If you are still working out which system fits, that is what the structural systems page is for.

Tell us what you are building.

Dimensions, use, and location are enough to start.

Start your project