A steel bid built off the S-drawings alone gets the tonnage right and still loses money. Columns, beams, braces and their connections carry a real quantity and a real unit rate, and every estimator prices that part carefully. Where a steel bid actually goes wrong is at the handoffs — grouting nobody claims, an anchor bolt survey nobody scheduled, a connection note that quietly moved engineering hours onto your desk. None of it shows up as tonnage, and all of it shows up as cost.
This is a working list of where those handoffs sit, built from what actually shows up across real Canadian ICI tenders. Not a fabrication standard — a list of the specific questions worth answering before the number leaves the office.
What's reliably yours
- Structural steel supply, fabrication and erection — columns, beams, braces and their connections per the S-drawings, including shop drawings, shop coatings and erection. This is the tonnage line, and it's the one part of the bid every estimator already reads carefully.
- Steel joists and metal decking — OWSJ supply and erection, deck supply, placement and fastening. Pull the deck closure and pour-stop assignment out explicitly rather than assuming it rides along with the deck itself; it's a separate line item on plenty of tenders.
- Connection design where delegated — delegated connection engineering, including stiffeners, doublers and reinforcing plates the conceptual details never show. When the notes delegate connection design to the fabricator, that's real engineering hours added to the bid, not a formality.
- Miscellaneous metals assigned to this package — stairs, railings, ladders, lintels, shelf angles, bollards. Extract exactly which items the tender assigns here; generic "misc metals as per drawings" language is a dispute waiting to happen, not a defined scope.
Where the fight actually happens
Anchor bolt and embed supply — three verbs, three different owners
Bolts, templates and embeds are frequently steel's to supply but concrete's to set — and a third verb, verify, gets assigned to whichever trade happens to read the spec closest. The trap isn't the split itself, which is standard practice; it's that most tenders state it in fragments across two sections instead of one clean sentence. Extract the supply/set/verify split verbatim, per item, rather than assuming a single default answer covers the whole anchor bolt package.
Base plate grouting — the item nobody claims
This is the most frequently missed line item in structural steel, and it's missed for a structural reason rather than a careless one: erectors routinely exclude it as finishing work, and concrete subs rarely claim it because grouting happens after their pour is long done and paid. The result is a gap that sits open until someone notices at close-in. Extract every grouting statement in the documents and who it names — material, strength, and the party responsible — because "grout by others" with no named other is not an answer.
Spray fireproofing and intumescent coatings — usually not yours, but confirm it
Fireproofing is normally a separate trade entirely, but the steel sections routinely mention it anyway — a surface-prep note, a primer compatibility requirement, sometimes a coordination clause with no clear owner. Extract the assignment whenever the steel sections reference it, even in passing, since a mention inside your own section is exactly the kind of line that gets read as inclusion by whoever's proofing the estimate against it later.
The other half: what isn't yours, even when it looks close
- Concrete work including bolt setting — setting anchor bolts in concrete is the concrete trade's placement work, not steel's. The nuance: verification tolerance and as-built survey requirements still gate your erection schedule even though the setting itself isn't your labour, which is exactly why the survey question below deserves its own line.
- Cold-formed steel framing — light-gauge framing belongs to the drywall or framing trade unless the documents expressly assign it here. Structural and cold-formed read as the same material to a casual glance; they're priced by different trades on almost every tender.
- Field painting — shop primer is this trade's, full stop. Finish painting and any touch-up after erection belongs to the painting schedule, and confirming that split before pricing avoids carrying a coat of paint that was never yours to carry.
Six things that hide outside the S-drawings
- Grouting, always. Worth repeating on its own: base and bearing plate grout — material, strength and who — is the single most-litigated gap between steel and concrete bids.
- Anchor bolt survey and tolerance language. As-built anchor plans required before erection, tolerance classes, and who's responsible for remediation when bolts miss.
- Delegated design triggers. "Connections by fabricator," performance-specified members, stair or railing engineering stamps — real engineering cost hiding in a note that reads like boilerplate.
- Crane, hoisting and site logistics. Crane supply, pad requirements, site access and shared-use language — erection cost the logistics paragraphs decide, not the tonnage sheet.
- Deck openings and reinforcement. Frames and reinforcing at mechanical openings, assigned inconsistently between steel, miscellaneous metals and mechanical.
- Galvanizing and coating triggers. Exterior, exposed or corrosive-environment members can flip from shop primer to full galvanizing with a single line in the general notes.
Who you're actually sharing the structure with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Concrete | Anchor bolts split six ways — supply, templates, setting, survey, remediation, grouting — across documents that scatter the assignment. Extract each duty with its named owner rather than assuming one clause covers all six. |
| Mechanical & electrical | Deck and framing openings, equipment support steel, and hangers off structure — sizes and ownership routinely arrive from M/E drawings after the steel package is already priced. |
| Fireproofing | Surface prep compatibility — primer versus unprimed steel for adhesion — and the erection-to-fireproofing sequence. Flag a spec conflict here rather than absorbing it as your own cost. |
| Drywall | Cold-formed versus structural steel boundaries at parapets, headers and shaft framing, where the two systems sit close enough on the drawings to blur. |
The pass that catches most of this
Read the S-drawings the way they deserve — connection by connection, since a delegated-design note or a grouting callout rarely repeats itself. Then hunt specifically for grouting and anchor bolt survey language across every section that touches concrete, because neither trade defaults to claiming it. The tonnage sheet is the bid's backbone; the handoffs above are what turn a correctly-tonned steel package into a number that doesn't get disputed the day the bolts miss.