This invention relates to a wall stud and more particularly to a wall stud for a portably/in-plant building.
The buildings of the type to which the wall stud of this invention relates are prefabricated and ready for assembly at the building site. Such buildings include in-plant offices, guard houses, food service buildings, control rooms, toll booths, parking lot booths, noise control buildings, and the like. These portable buildings must be of quality construction, strong and durable. They should be energy efficient, have good sound control and low maintenance. Other characteristics of such buildings are that they must be relatively easy to assemble at the job site and easily disassembled for moving to a different location if desired. They should also be economical.
Such building structures are well-known in the art as are wall studs for use with such building structures. Typically, such wall studs are of extruded aluminum and have side recesses for receiving the side edges of wall panels to form the walls of the building.
One such prior art wall stud has interfitting telescoping members with lateral flanges which sandwich the wall panels therebetween. One of the members, the exterior member, has a single elongated socket centrally located along its back wall for anchoring screws which extend through the back wall of the other member, the interior member, to fasten them together. Hence, the fasteners or screws are along a single longitudinal line. Another known prior art wall stud has two elongated sockets extending in parallel relationship down the back wall of the exterior member. The side walls of the interior member have lateral shoulders through which fasteners extend and anchor in the longitudinal sockets. However, this known structure has spacing between the shoulders and the sockets which can allow some degree of buckling or twisting under load conditions to which the stud is subjected. Still another wall stud structure, shown by U.S. Pat. No. 4,196,555, has side-by-side members that pivot relative to each other with means for locking the two sections together when pivoted to a predetermined position.
The present invention is an improvement to the wall stud of the type having telescoping members as described above and which provides improved strength and stability under load without sacrificing ease of assembly. In accordance with the present invention there are provided outwardly angled flanges and mating outwardly angled side wall portions at both sides of the stud which firmly seat with each other when the stud members are in telescoping engagement. The firmly seated and mating angled flanges and angled side wall potions receive fasteners at both sides of the stud to secure them in mating engagement and thereby secure the members in telescoping engagement. Once the members are secured the wall studs have exceptional rigidity and strength to carry the transverse, lateral, and vertical loads required by the building structure.