Had a bit of a problem with cracked mortar joints and a "saging" lintel above the 16ft double car garage door at our daughters home in Knoxville. I believe it was a design/builder flaw when the house was built in 2004. Found a company on line that developed the "Lintel Lift" solution out of Birmingham. A local installation company took on the 10.5 hour project (it was their first install under the direction of Greg from Lintel Lift.) Check out
https://www.lintellift.com/

 

I'm a EE not an ME or civil engineer, but i did take a lot of their courses.
My guesstimate is there is about 3-4 tons of bricks sitting on that lintel. Throw in 8 feet of torque to get to the center, that is somewhere around 50,000 ft-lbs of force.
During the initial build phase that should have had a 6-8 inch steel I-beam to support that many bricks.
'cuz, gravity works.

 

Yep .... an "I" been would have been great. However, the builder decided to use 2 each 8 ft angle lintels butted together and I can only assume they were bolted to the wooden header that holds up the wood frame of the house and that was probably underbuilt . Odd thing is that every 2 car garage in the developement whether siding, 59 courses of brick or 2 courses of brick above the garage door use the same 2 lintels 8 foot long.

 

I assume there are many building defects in that region to support a company that just does lintel lifts. We don't get much of that in our parts as our building standards are pretty strict, glad to hear it got fixed correctly. Good work.

 

there is one company lintellift that developed the product out of Birminham, AL. The so called authorized installers seem to be "Foundation " fix it companies. There are none in VA.

 

I would love to have that much garage space, sag or no sag. But the inevitable cracks in the brick work would annoy me. Nice job. Hope it holds up. That L beam looks pretty stout but that is a lot of downward force at the center, although I would think the masonry would help distribute forces away from the center, at least a little.

 

I would think that eventually it will sag too.

 

Maybe there’s some kind of Wonder Bra out there you could get for it?

 

the original lintel has a sag ...a happy face .... while the new lintel (lift) has a sad smile....the new lintel if it sags will take a while to sag.