Custom Glulam Bracket

This bracket was a small piece of a larger AV install at a church in Panama City, but it's a good example of the kind of problem that doesn't have an off-the-shelf answer. The job called for mounting a 200 lb speaker to a glulam beam, and a suitable off-the-shelf bracket had a lead time of around four months — far too long for the project's schedule.

So I designed one instead: a custom steel bracket sized to bolt directly to the beam. I prototyped it, then load-tested it well past its working requirement — suspending around 700 lbs from it with no signs of failure — and ran the numbers through simulation to estimate a theoretical break point of about 1,500 lbs, roughly 7-8x the load it would actually carry.

It's a small project, but it's the kind of custom fabrication work that comes up more often than people expect on AV jobs — when the part you need doesn't exist yet, sometimes the fastest path is to design and build it yourself.