Gang Form Panel Calculator

Gang forms trade the labor of hand-setting individual form panels for the capital cost of a crane and a pre-assembled steel-and-plywood panel that gets flown into place as one unit, so this calculator's job is really two separate questions: can the crane on site lift it, and does reusing it enough times make it cheaper than conventional forming? Panel weight comes straight from face area times a weight-per-square-foot figure you set for the frame-and-plywood system (typically 15-25 psf), and the crane pick adds an 8% allowance for rigging hardware before applying a 1.25 safety margin to land on a minimum required crane capacity — a conservative number meant to be checked against the crane's rated capacity at the actual pick radius, not just its nameplate maximum.

The economics run on a separate track, reported two ways: the panel's per-square-foot purchase cost divided by the number of expected reuses gives a cost-per-use-per-square-foot figure, while the total cost of every panel needed for the job divided by the same number of reuses gives a cost-per-use-for-the-whole-job figure — both only get favorable once a project runs enough repetitive pours to amortize the upfront purchase, which is why the number of reuses input matters more to the bid than the panel dimensions do. Panel count for the job is a straight division of total wall length by panel width, doubled for both faces of the wall, with no allowance for return corners or bracing panels that a real layout would add.