Building Insulating and lining Internal Walls

This photo shows the insulation of one of the walls that I built. The batts in this picutre are designed to reduce heat transfer through the wall and also to reduce the sound penetration between rooms on either side of the wall. Every wall we built on this project was fully insulated with "soundproof" batts as per the clients requirement to minimise the transfer of noise between commercial tenancies.

This picture shows the structure of the walls that we built. The walls were approximately 2400mm high Studs 600mm centers and nogs at 800 and 1600 from FFL.

Bracing Elements

This is the corner of a bracing element. Bracing elements are screwed off in such a way that the Gib provides bracing and strenth to the wall that it is screwed to. Bracing elements are important in creating strength against vertical  loadings on these particular walls. This is a two story structure, thus all bracing elements in this project were on the first floor providing vertical load resistance.

There are a wide variety of bracing elements designed for different purposes. The requirement for a bracing element is determined by architectural engineers. If a bracing element is required it will be shown on architectural drawings and coded according to the type of bracing element that is required. For example a GS1 is a bracing element by which one side of a wall needs to be screwed off to the specification outlined in the Gib bracing guide book. In the case above, the wall was a 9 meter GS2 bracing element and required a pattern of screw fixing in four corners of the wall on both sides of the wall. In addition we used handy brackets in the two bottom corners of the bracing element in order to satisfy the requirements of the plan detail provided by the architectural engineer.