Rebar detailing and the bar bending schedule field guide

What rebar detailing and the bar bending schedule are

Rebar detailing is the work of turning the structural engineer's drawings into instructions a shop can fabricate and a crew can install. The engineer designs the structure and shows the reinforcing in concept: this beam gets these bars, this wall gets this mat, develop here, lap there. None of that tells the shop how long to cut a bar or which way to bend it. The detailer fills that gap.

The output is two things. The placing drawings, which show every bar in plan and section with a mark on it, and the bar bending schedule, the BBS, which lists each bar by mark, size, grade, quantity, cut length, and the shape with its bend dimensions. The drawing tells you where the bar goes. The schedule tells the shop how to make it. Together they are the detailing deliverable, and they are what stands between a structural design and a pile of steel that fits.

Detailing sits on top of two ideas this site covers in their own guides. The bar has to be placed at the right cover and spacing, and it has to be embedded or lapped long enough to develop its strength. For cover, chairs, and spacing, see the rebar placement and cover guide. For development length and how laps are sized, see the development length and lap splices guide. This guide is about how the design becomes the actual cut, bent, marked steel.

What is a bar bending schedule?

A bar bending schedule is the table that lists every reinforcing bar on the job, one line per bar type, with everything the shop and the field need to make it and place it. It is the recipe. The fabricator cuts and bends off it, the field finds and sets steel off it, and the estimator weighs the job off it.

Each line carries the same set of fields. The bar mark, a unique tag for that bar type. The size, given as a US bar number like #5 or a metric diameter like 16 mm. The grade or type of steel. The number of bars. The cut length, the straight length of stock the shop shears before any bend. The shape, given as a standard shape code with the bend dimensions called out as A, B, C and so on. And the location, so the field knows which member the bar belongs to.

Read one line and you should be able to picture the bar in your hand: a #5, 14 ft 6 in long, bent into an L with a 2 ft leg, forty of them, for the grade beams on line 4. That is the whole point of the schedule. It compresses a bar into a line of data precise enough to fabricate from without seeing the drawing.

BBS

Bar bending schedule, the table of every bar by mark, size, length, shape, and quantity

Bar mark

The unique identifier tying a schedule line to a bar on the placing drawing and a tag in the bundle

Cut length

The straight length of bar the shop shears before any bend is made

Shape code

A standard code naming the bend shape, with bend dimensions labeled A, B, C and so on

Shop drawings and placing drawings

The placing drawings are the detailer's plans and sections that show every bar set in place, each one tagged with its mark. They are not the engineer's structural drawings redrawn. They are a build set, drawn so a rodbuster can stand on the deck, find the line, and know exactly which bar goes where, which way the hooks face, and how the laps land.

On the structural set, the engineer might show a typical beam section and a note that says the rest are similar. The detailer cannot build from similar. The placing drawings resolve every beam, every corner, every opening, every place where two members frame together and the steel has to share the same space. The schedule and the placing drawings reference each other through the marks, so a bar on the drawing points to a line in the BBS and back again.

This is also where the detailer earns the job. A good set anticipates the field. It shows the bar that has to go in first, calls out the congested joint before the crew finds it the hard way, and dimensions the hooks so they clear the form. A thin set that just repeats the engineer's notes pushes every one of those decisions out to the deck, where they get made fast and wrong.

Bar marks and the tagging system

A bar mark is a unique tag for each distinct bar type, and it is how the field finds the right steel in a yard full of bundles. Two bars get the same mark only when they are identical: same size, same grade, same cut length, same shape, same bends. Change any one of those and it is a different mark.

The shop bends each mark, bundles the bars of that mark together, and wires a metal tag on the bundle stamped with the mark, the size, the count, and often the job and the member. The crew reads the placing drawing, sees the mark called for at that line, and pulls the bundle with the matching tag. No measuring on the deck, no guessing whether this is the 14 ft 6 in bar or the 15 ft bar. The mark does that work.

Mix up a mark and the error is quiet and expensive. A bundle tagged wrong, or a crew that grabs the close-enough bundle because the right one is buried, puts the wrong bar in the wall. It looks like steel. It passes a glance. It is the wrong length or the wrong bend, and nobody knows until an inspector pulls a tape or the bar will not reach its lap. The tag is the cheapest quality control on the job. Use it.

What are rebar shape codes?

Rebar shape codes are a standard library of bend shapes, each with a code, so a bent bar can be described in the schedule without drawing it every time. A straight bar, an L, a U, a closed stirrup or tie, a bar with a hook on one or both ends: each is a known shape, and the schedule names the code and fills in the leg dimensions.

Which code library you use depends on the standard the project runs under. A lot of the world, including the UK and much of the Middle East and Asia, schedules to BS 8666, which uses numbered shape codes: 00 for a straight bar, 21 for a U, 51 for a closed stirrup, and so on, each with a fixed formula for the cut length. US work follows the ACI detailing manual and the CRSI conventions, which describe the standard bar bends by type rather than the same numbering. The shapes are the same steel either way. The labels and the cut-length formulas differ, so confirm which system the schedule is built on before you read a code off it.

The shape code is shorthand, not a substitute for the dimensions. The code tells the bender what bends to make and in what order. The A, B, C dimensions tell it how long each leg is. A shape code with no dimensions, or dimensions that do not add up to a buildable bar, is a detailing error the shop should kick back, not bend around.

Bend types, hooks, and the standard hook

Most bends fall into a short list. The standard end hooks are the 90, the 135, and the 180, named for the angle the bar turns through. A 90 turns a right angle and runs a straight extension off the bend. A 180 folds the bar back on itself, the classic candy-cane. The 135 is the workhorse on stirrups and ties, and it is the angle the seismic detailing leans on.

Hook geometry is set by the standard, not by eye. For main-bar end hooks under ACI 318, a 90-degree hook commonly carries a straight extension of 12 bar diameters past the bend, and a 180-degree hook carries about 4 bar diameters but not less than 2.5 in. Stirrup and tie hooks have their own extensions. The seismic hook is a 135-degree bend with an extension of 6 bar diameters but not less than 3 in, hooked around a longitudinal bar so the tie cannot peel open when the joint cycles. Circular hoops are allowed a 90 in place of the 135 in some cases. These dimensions move between code editions, so detail them to the adopted edition and the project, not to memory.

The hook is also a development question. A hooked bar develops in a shorter embedment than a straight one, and the engineer counts on that hook to anchor the bar where there is no room for a straight run. For how the hook earns its development length, see the development length and lap splices guide. Here the point is narrower: the detailer has to call the right hook, at the right angle, with the right extension, or the bar that fits the form does not anchor the way the design assumed.

What is the minimum bend diameter for rebar?

The minimum bend diameter is the smallest diameter the bar can be bent around without damaging the steel, and it is set by bar size. Bend a bar tighter than its minimum and you cold-work the metal hard enough to crack it on the inside of the bend or weaken it, which defeats the point of the hook you just made.

Under ACI 318 the common values, expressed as a multiple of the bar diameter d, run by size. For standard hooks in the larger main bars, the minimum inside bend diameter is on the order of 6d for #3 through #8, 8d for #9 through #11, and 10d for #14 and #18. Stirrups and ties bend tighter because they are smaller, commonly 4d for #3 through #5. Those are the typical figures; the governing numbers live in the code and shift between editions, so pull them from the adopted edition and the project documents rather than this paragraph.

In the shop this number is the pin, or mandrel, the bar wraps around on the bender. The bigger the bar, the bigger the pin. A detailer who calls a tight hook on a large bar is asking the shop to do something the steel will not take, and a good shop calls it back. The bend diameter is also why a hook eats more length than its straight extension suggests, which feeds straight into the cut length.

How rebar cut length is calculated

The cut length is the straight piece of stock the shop shears before it bends anything, and it is not the sum of the leg dimensions on the drawing. It is the sum of the segments and hook extensions minus a deduction at each bend. Get this wrong and the bar comes off the bender the wrong size, every time, for the whole mark.

Here is why it is not just addition. The bend dimensions A, B, C on a schedule are usually given to the outside of the bar, so the legs are measured corner to corner. But the bar does not travel along the outside corner. It travels along its own length, around the radius of each bend, and that path is shorter than the square outside dimensions imply. So if you add the outside legs and cut to that, every bent bar comes out long. The fix is to subtract a known amount at each bend, the bend deduction, so the cut length matches the bar you actually want.

BS 8666 publishes the cut-length formula for each shape code, with the deduction built in as terms like minus a fraction of the radius and the bar diameter, and it adds a small allowance for spring-back because the bar relaxes open slightly after it leaves the pin. US detailing applies the same idea through standard bend-deduction values. Either way, the cut length is the answer the field cares about. The legs describe the finished shape; the cut length is what gets sheared.

What is a bend deduction?

A bend deduction is the amount you subtract from the summed leg dimensions at each bend to get the true cut length. It exists because measuring a bent bar leg to leg along the outside overstates how much steel is actually in the bar. Bend the bar and the corner is a radius, not a sharp angle, and the bar's real length runs the short way around that radius.

Think about a single 90-degree bend. The drawing says leg A is 24 in and leg B is 12 in, measured to the outside corners, so the naive cut is 36 in. But the bar rounds the corner on a radius set by the bend diameter, and the actual steel from end to end is a little less than 36. The deduction is that difference. Add a deduction for each bend in the shape and the cut length drops below the sum of the legs by a predictable amount that depends on the bar size, the bend angle, and the bend radius.

This is the calculation a detailer has to get right, because the error does not show up until the steel is bent and somebody lays a tape on it. A bar cut without the deduction is too long, the hooks or legs land past where they should, and the bar may not seat in the form or reach its lap. Larger bars and tighter bends carry bigger deductions, so the error grows exactly where it does the most damage. Treat the bend deduction as part of the cut length, not an afterthought.

Lap splices and bar lengths in the schedule

Bars do not come in unlimited lengths, so a run longer than a stick has to be made from two or more bars lapped together. The detailer shows where those laps fall, how long they are, and how they stagger so the splices in adjacent bars do not all stack in the same plane. All of that comes off the engineer's lap schedule and the governing code, never off a number somebody remembers.

The schedule reflects the lap in two places. The cut lengths are set so the bars reach their splice points with the lap built in, and the quantity counts the extra steel the laps consume. A wall pour 80 ft long built from 40 ft stock is not two bars end to end. It is bars with lap length added at each splice, staggered down the wall, and the detailer has to account for both the geometry and the tonnage the laps add.

How long a lap has to be, the difference between a Class A and Class B splice, and when a mechanical coupler beats a lap, are their own subject. The detailing job is to place the laps the design calls for and reflect them in the lengths and counts. For how lap lengths are actually determined, see the development length and lap splices guide. A detailer who shortens a lap to save a foot of steel is overriding the engineer, which is not the detailer's call to make.

Stock lengths and getting the yield

Rebar comes in standard lengths, and the detailer cuts the schedule to use them well. In the US, distributors commonly stock 20 ft and 40 ft, with 60 ft available, often from the mill on larger orders. The schedule has to live inside those lengths: no cut length can exceed the stock you can actually buy, and a bar longer than stock becomes a lapped run instead.

The economy is in the yield. Cut a 40 ft stick into an 18 ft bar and you have a 22 ft drop that may or may not match another mark on the job. A detailer who lays the cut lengths out against the stock lengths can pair marks so the offcut from one becomes the bar for another, and the scrap drops. On a big job that optimization is real money, because every foot of drop is steel you bought and threw in the bin.

This is also a constructability check. The longest cut length on the schedule has to be a length the shop can buy, the truck can carry, and the crew can handle in the air. A 40 ft bar that has to be threaded into a congested column cage by hand is a different problem than the same tonnage in shorter, lapped lengths. The schedule that reads clean on paper still has to be steel a crew can lift and set.

Bar lists, weight, and quantities

The bar list and the weight come straight off the schedule. Each mark has a size, a cut length, and a count, and steel has a known weight per foot by size, so the tonnage falls out by multiplication: weight per foot, times the cut length, times the number of bars, summed across every mark. That total is what gets ordered, priced, and trucked.

The weight per foot is fixed by bar size and does not change with grade. A #5 weighs 1.043 lb per ft whether it is Grade 40 or Grade 80, because the weight is geometry, not strength. So the take-off is a clean calculation once the schedule is right, which is exactly why an error in a cut length or a count ripples into the order and the estimate. Detail the schedule wrong and you order the wrong tonnage.

For estimating the job off these quantities, the take-off feeds the price and the schedule of values; that pricing work is its own topic. The detailer's part is making sure the schedule the take-off rests on is accurate, because every downstream number, the order, the bid, the delivery tickets, inherits whatever is in the BBS.

Bar sizes, grades, and deformations

US rebar runs from #3 to #18, and for #3 through #8 the number is the diameter in eighths of an inch. A #3 is 3/8 in, a #4 is 1/2 in, a #8 is a full inch. Above #8 the simple eighths rule stops; #9, #10, and #11 are sized by area to match what used to be square bars, and #14 and #18 are the heavy bars used in columns and mats. Metric drawings size by millimeter diameter instead, so a 16 mm bar sits near a #5.

Grade is the yield strength, in thousands of psi. Grade 60 is the everyday bar, 60,000 psi yield. Grade 40 is older and lighter-duty, Grade 80 and Grade 100 are higher-strength bars showing up more in heavy and seismic work where they let you carry the same force in less steel. The grade does not change the weight per foot. It changes how much load the bar carries and, on the schedule, which spec it is called to.

Two specs cover most of it. ASTM A615 is the common carbon-steel deformed bar. ASTM A706 is a low-alloy bar with controlled chemistry and a capped strength ratio, made to weld and to behave in seismic frames where the bar has to yield in a predictable way. The deformations, the ribs rolled into the surface, are what let the concrete grip the bar, and the bar is rolled with marks identifying the mill, the size, the grade, and the spec. The schedule has to call the grade and spec the engineer specified, because A615 and A706 are not interchangeable where the design counts on A706.

The detailing standards: ACI 315, SP-66, and CRSI

Detailing in the US runs on a few documents. The ACI detailing standard, historically ACI 315 and now carried in the ACI Detailing Manual, SP-66, sets the standards of practice for both the engineer and the detailer: how reinforcing is shown on the structural drawings, how the placing drawings are made, the standard hooks and bends, tolerances, and special details for seismic frames and joints. It splits the responsibilities so each side knows what it owns.

The CRSI Manual of Standard Practice is the other working reference, the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute's manual covering bar sizes, standard fabrication, supports, and the conventions the industry shares. Between SP-66 and the CRSI manual you have the shape standards, the hook geometry, the bend diameters, and the tolerances a detailer details to. Outside the US, BS 8666 plays the equivalent role for scheduling, dimensioning, bending, and cutting.

Cite these to the point they govern. The hook angles, the bend diameters, and the shape conventions come from ACI and CRSI, but the controlling numbers for a given job are whatever the adopted code edition and the project documents say, and those move between editions. When a detail and a standard seem to disagree, the engineer of record resolves it, not the detailer working alone.

Do rebar shop drawings need engineer approval?

Yes. The shop drawings and the bar bending schedule are a submittal, and they go to the engineer of record for review and approval before anything is fabricated. The detailer prepares them, the contractor submits them, the engineer reviews them against the design, and only then does the shop cut and bend. Bending steel ahead of approval is a gamble against your own money.

The reason is simple. The detailer is interpreting the engineer's intent, and the engineer is the one who knows whether the interpretation is right. The review catches a misread lap, a wrong bar mark, a hook facing the wrong way, a detail that does not match the design assumption. Catch it on paper and it is a markup. Catch it after the shop has bent two tons of the wrong mark and it is scrap plus a schedule hit.

Fabricating to an unapproved submittal is one of the classic ways a rebar package goes sideways. The shop bends to save time, the engineer comes back with revisions, and now there is bent steel that does not match the approved set. Wait for the approved or approved-as-noted stamp, build to that revision, and keep the approved set on the job so the field and the shop are working from the same drawing the engineer signed.

Fabrication: from schedule to bent steel

Once the submittal is approved, the shop works off the schedule. The bars are sheared to cut length, run through the bender to the shape code and bend dimensions, then bundled by mark and tagged. The tag carries the mark, the size, the count, and the job, and that tag is what ties the steel back to the schedule and the placing drawing.

The shop is also the last check on a buildable detail. A bend diameter too tight for the bar, a cut length that exceeds stock, a shape that cannot be made in the order the schedule implies: the bender finds these. A good shop kicks them back instead of forcing them, because a cracked bend or a wrong-length bar is a defect that travels to the field. The schedule is the instruction, but the shop floor still has eyes on whether the instruction makes sense in steel.

Bundles are then staged for delivery in the sequence the pour needs, so the bars that go in first are not buried under the bars that go in last. That staging is a detailing and logistics decision as much as a yard one, and it is the difference between a crew that places steel and a crew that spends the morning digging for the right bundle.

Using the schedule in the field

On the deck, the crew works from the placing drawings and the schedule together. The drawing says which mark goes at which line. The schedule says what that mark is. The tag on the bundle says which steel matches. Read the three against each other and the right bar, the right length, the right bend lands in the right place without anyone measuring a thing.

The field reads the schedule to get the bar set correctly: the right mark at the right spacing, the hooks turned the way the drawing shows, the laps landing where they belong with the stagger held. The bend dimensions on the schedule tell the crew whether the bar that arrived is the bar that was ordered, which is the first thing to check when something does not fit the form.

Once the steel is set, the work hands off to the placement and cover inspection, where the cage gets checked against the drawings before the pour seals it in. For that pre-pour walk, the cover, the spacing, the chairs, and the laps, see the rebar placement and cover guide. The schedule got the right steel made and delivered. The placement inspection confirms it ended up where the design put it.

Detailing around congestion and clashes

The place detailing earns its keep is where bars from different members try to occupy the same space. A beam-column joint is the classic. Column verticals, column ties, beam top and bottom bars from two directions, and the beam stirrups all arrive at one cube of concrete, and on a careless detail they clash. The bars cannot physically pass through each other, and the crew finds that out with the steel in their hands and the pour scheduled.

Congestion is also a cover and consolidation problem. Pack too much steel into a section and there is no room for the aggregate to pass between the bars, so the concrete honeycombs around the cage and the cover gets squeezed below spec. A detailer who only checks that the bars are present, not that they fit with clearance for the concrete to flow, has detailed a section that cannot be poured well.

The fix is to resolve the clash on the drawing. Sequence which bars thread first, bundle bars where the code allows it, adjust hook directions so they nest instead of collide, and flag the joint where the design simply asks for more steel than the section holds so the engineer can weigh in. The detailer who catches the joint on paper saves the crew a bad morning and saves the job a field fix that compromises the design. That is the difference between detailing and just drawing bars.

Detailing software and model-based detailing

Most production detailing runs on software now. aSa is the long-standing rebar detailing and fabrication system, Tekla Structures models the steel in 3D and generates the schedules off the model, and Revit handles rebar inside a building information model where the reinforcing lives in the same model as the rest of the structure. The output is the same placing drawings and bar bending schedule, generated from a model instead of drawn by hand.

The advantage of model-based detailing is that the clash shows up in the model before it shows up on the deck. Model the joint in 3D and the column ties and beam bars that would have collided in the field collide on screen, where fixing them costs minutes. The schedule and the drawings stay in sync with the model, so a change to a bar updates the count and the length everywhere it appears, instead of being fixed in one place and missed in another.

The tool does not replace the detailer's judgment. A model will happily generate a schedule full of bars that are tight to bend, awkward to place, or technically present but impossible to consolidate. The standards, the bend diameters, the constructability, the call on whether a joint actually works: those are the detailer's, and the software is how the detailer gets there faster, not a substitute for knowing the steel.

Checking delivered steel against the schedule

When the steel shows up, check it against the schedule before it goes in the forms, because once it is set and poured it is there for good. Read the tag, match the mark to the schedule, and confirm the size, the count, and the shape are what the line calls for. A bundle that is short a few bars or carries the wrong bend is cheaper to catch on the ground than in the cage.

On the bent bars, the bend dimensions and the hooks are what to verify. Lay a tape on a sample: does leg A match the schedule, is the hook the right angle with the right extension, is the bend diameter what the size calls for. The seismic 135-degree hook in particular is one to confirm, because a 90 substituted where a 135 was specified looks close and is not, and it is the kind of thing that gets caught only if someone actually checks the angle.

Tie the check back to the marks. The whole system, the schedule, the placing drawing, the tag, only works if the steel in the bundle is the steel the tag claims. Spot-check enough bundles to trust the shop's tagging, check the awkward and the seismic shapes harder, and document what you checked. The bar that fails this check on the ground is a markup. The same bar found after the pour is a core sample and an argument.

Field and detailing checklist

Common mistakes

• Cutting to the summed leg dimensions without the bend deduction, so every bent bar comes out long.
• Calling the wrong shape code or wrong bend dimension, so the bar does not match the design.
• Missing or wrong hooks, especially a 90 where a seismic 135-degree hook was specified.
• Fabricating to an unapproved submittal, then re-cutting when the engineer returns revisions.
• Detailing a congested joint that cannot be physically built or properly consolidated.
• Shortening a lap or changing a stagger to save steel, overriding the engineer's design.
• Bar-mark mix-ups, where a wrong tag puts the wrong bar in the member.
• Calling a cut length longer than the stock the shop can buy, or a bar a crew cannot handle.

What to document

The record is what lets anyone later prove the steel that went in matched the design the engineer approved. Keep the approved submittal revision, the schedule it goes with, and what was verified at delivery and at placement. When a question comes up years out, the record is the only thing that answers it.

Capture the approved revision number and date, the marks checked against the drawing, the cut lengths and bends verified, the hooks confirmed including any seismic hooks, the lap locations checked, and any conflict the field flagged back to the engineer. If a detail was revised after a clash, record which revision the steel was built to, because the next person needs to know which drawing the cage matches.

Detailing heavy foundations and data-center mats

The big-tonnage jobs, deep mats, transfer slabs, heavy industrial and data-center foundations, push detailing harder because the steel is dense, the bars are large, and the laps and hooks consume real space. A mat with two or three layers of #11 each way, laps staggered through it, is a detailing problem before it is a placing problem. The cut lengths bump against stock lengths, the laps add tonnage, and the bottom layer has to be placeable before the top layer goes on.

Congestion is the governing constraint on these. Where columns and pile caps frame into a thick mat, the verticals, the ties, and the mat bars meet in a volume that has to be poured solid, and the detail has to leave room for the concrete to reach the bottom. Large bars also carry the bigger bend diameters and the bigger deductions, so a cut-length error on a #14 or #18 is a large, expensive piece of wrong steel.

On these jobs the model-based detailing pays for itself, because the clashes are too many and too tight to catch by eye, and the schedule is too large to keep in sync by hand. The principles do not change. The scale does, and at scale the cheap mistakes get expensive fast.

Standards and references

The detailing framework comes from a few documents. The ACI detailing standard, ACI 315 and now the ACI Detailing Manual SP-66, sets how reinforcing is shown and detailed, the standard hooks and bends, and the special seismic details. The CRSI Manual of Standard Practice covers bar sizes, fabrication, supports, and the shared industry conventions. Hook geometry, bend diameters, and shape practice trace to these, with ACI 318 carrying the code requirements for hooks and minimum bend diameters that the details have to meet.

The bars themselves are ASTM. ASTM A615 covers the common carbon-steel deformed bar, and ASTM A706 covers the low-alloy weldable bar used where welding or seismic behavior is required. Outside the US, BS 8666 governs the scheduling, dimensioning, bending, and cutting, including the numbered shape codes and the cut-length formulas with their bend deductions. The shape codes, the hook angles, and the bend diameters cited here are typical of ACI and CRSI practice, but the governing numbers for any job are whatever the adopted code edition and the project documents specify, and those change between editions.

Two things hold across all of it. The cut length is the legs minus the bend deductions, not the legs added up, and nothing gets fabricated until the engineer of record has approved the submittal. Detail to the standard, build to the approved revision, and let the engineer resolve anything the standard and the design seem to disagree on.

Units, terms, and conventions

Detailing reads differently across a US set and a metric set, and the same bar can be named more than one way, so it helps to keep the terms straight.

Bar size is a US bar number, #3 to #18, where #3 through #8 is the diameter in eighths of an inch, or a metric diameter in millimeters. Grade is the yield in thousands of psi, so Grade 60 is 60,000 psi, or the metric equivalent in MPa. Cut length, the sheared length, is given in feet and inches in the US and in millimeters metric. Bend dimensions are the A, B, C legs of the shape, usually to the outside of the bar. Weight is pounds per foot in the US, kilograms per meter metric. The bar bending schedule is also called the bar schedule or rebar schedule, and the placing drawings are sometimes called shop drawings, though strictly the shop drawings are the whole package the placing drawings belong to.

Bar bending schedule (BBS)

The table listing every bar by mark, size, grade, quantity, cut length, and shape

Placing drawings

The detailer's plans and sections showing every bar set in place and tagged with its mark

Cut length

The straight sheared stock length, equal to the legs minus the bend deductions

Bend deduction

The amount subtracted at each bend because the bar's true length is shorter than the summed outside legs

Shape code

The standard code naming a bend shape, per ACI/CRSI or BS 8666

Seismic hook

A 135-degree hook with a 6db extension, but not less than 3 in, anchoring a tie around a longitudinal bar

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