17 – Assembly – panel expansion
If you have given enough care to planning your project you should find that the pieces would all go together nicely once you are ready to assemble them on-site. There is one thing that occurs to me to mention about prefabrication of panels that does impact final assembly that you might want to think about when you are doing your design. It turns out that the more panels you assemble side by side the greater potential there is for dimensional errors. What I am referring to here is that panels are not always exactly the size that you think they are. Wood products might swell, bow or twist a bit between when you fabricate them and when you are ready to assemble them. When you are putting the panels together you might not be pulling them together as tightly as they need to be either. This issue may or may not be a problem depending on the nature of your project.
For one thing the smaller your building is the less likely it is that there will be enough of a difference to bother you. Also there might be some automatically compensating factors about the way that your building goes together. For example if your entire building is made out of panels from floor through the roof then the entire overall size of your building might just be a little bigger than you thought it would be. The assembly of your floor panels might grow a little such that you do not notice that your wall panels grow a little when you assemble them. Also the size variation tends to occur at panel junctions. This fundamentally means that fewer panels means less size variation.
There are two basic ways to deal with this issue. One is to design your building so that you can tolerate it being slightly bigger. The other approach is to intentionally fabricate some part of your design slightly smaller in anticipation of the growth. Remember it is a lot easier to add a thin spacer or shim between panels than it is to cut a panel smaller on the job site. One good place to consider doing this for wall panels is at the corner where walls will connect. One panel will typically have sheathing material that overlaps the end of the other wall. Consider making the wall framing on that panel just a little smaller. It would be a very good place to add a small space if necessary and the sheathing material makes up for their being a small gap between the panels. Refer to the drawing below which shows a top view of a wall corner for where you might do this.
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