Can a crane or telehandler lift the house's wall panels, and does anything but weight and wind limit it?

What it found

Takes the eight wall panels of house-offsite and finds their weight (343–559 lb open, 376–877 lb closed; 3,753 and 5,031 lb for the shell), the best two pick points on each, and the top-plate bending at a 1.5 impact factor: 4–12% of the allowable stress, and plate bending alone would allow a solid panel of 60 ft with two picks (28 ft with one). Bending never limits the layout; the lift is a weight and wind problem. At the NIOSH 51 lb limit a panel needs 7–18 people, so hand-lifting is out, and a 20 ft open panel hung broad face to the wind swings 10° at about 12 mph (15 mph closed). Stylised: densities, glazing weight, impact and drag are assumed, the lift is a rigid-body estimate, and the sheathing is ignored.

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

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Other research topics

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.