Also, keep in mind that that tree drinks a lot of water - if the house is in an area prone to expansive soils, you should expect to see some foundation movement in that area in the next year or so associated with the changing moisture content of the soil.
vato, I live in the midwest, where we have some pretty expansive soils sometimes, and I've never heard of anyone trying to maintain a minimum footing load to try to counteract heave due to soil expansion (maybe I'm too green?). There is a book by Dr. Richard Handy called "The Day the House Fell"...
Dave;
" . . . so in reality you should take the chord force, divide by one-half of the length of the diaphragm, and multiply by two."
If your suggesting that the distributed shear varies linearly from the end of the chord to the center, then shouldn't you take the chord force, divide by...
So my office recently purchased the 6th edition of the Reinforced Masonry Engineering Handbook (awesome, by the way), and example 4-A illustrates a simple lateral-load-on-diaphragm problem. The author begins by treating the diaphragm like a flexible beam and determines the moment in the...
