In general delegated design connections need to be stamped by an engineer licensed in the project jurisdiction if the connections have not been designed by the EOR. Are you doing the design of the connections?
Based on the snip you provided it appears that the EOR is noting that the beam is...
We have seen a lot of townhouse construction lately, and have been having a mild disagreement in the office about how the foundations should be protected from frost. These are typical IRC townhouses, defined as
[RB] TOWNHOUSE. A single-family dwelling unit constructed in a group of three or...
The big benefit of perforated shear walls over segmented is that you can look at the entire wall, including openings. With a segmented shear wall each panel stands on it's own, meaning that the overturning/uplift calculation is for each panel alone. With a perforated wall you can run the...
The perforated tie down requirement is a bit tricky, since it's the one thing that really differs from the standard wall framing. In my experience, typical sill anchors are generally OK for the uplift load at the base, though the spacing might need to be dropped depending on how heavy the...
Our typical process is to design the stringer as a beam, and note on the drawings what size LVL or dimension lumber it is to be cut from, and what the remaining depth required is once the treads have been cut out. We typically provide a hanger size for the top and bottom hanger, or a detail for...
That makes sense - having the supported area add up to more than 100% doesn't really track. It also doesn't make sense that removing 1/3 of one of the bearing lines (when there are 4) would trigger a 30% threshold. The engineer originally looking at the project read the current code and assumed...
I am working on a renovation to an existing building, and one section of the IEBC is causing a bit of disagreement within the office. The section in question reads as follows:
[BS] SUBSTANTIAL STRUCTURAL ALTERATION.
An alteration in which the gravity load-carrying structural
elements altered...
Thanks Jason - That was my reading but it's good to have someone more familiar with that part of the code weigh in.
Regarding the why don't we just do the engineering for the shear walls - generally that's where we end up, particularly for anything that's taller than 1 story (or 1 1/2)...
We use Tedds for this in our office. Their out of the box calcs are pretty variable (and have been getting worse as they try to make them more advanced) but as a word add in it's super handy. Not as ugly as mathcad and handles variables really well.
We have been having a discussion in my office lately on the requirements for designing townhouses per the IRC. The main question is do we need to comply with the braced wall requirements per unit, or is the entire group of townhouses to be designed as a single structure. Often these structures...
Creep is a known concern with wood trusses, and the additional deflection over time can lead to higher than expected deflections than those reported by the design software. I am currently working on a building where there were some drywall cracks and the owner is concerned that the building is...
Yeah, nothing is changing for this one - we can't even use the densglass, because the original building design was based on R=6.5 and incorporating densglass drops it to R=2.
I was mostly curious because this isn't the first time I've had a contractor try to claim that spray foam would make...
I have a project where they were supposed to install wood sheathing on a shear wall, and neglected to do so. The contractor is now trying to argue that the densglass sheathing and spray foam should provide some shear resistance, so they don't have to strip off the existing gyp and provide the...
I'm currently working on a project in Massachusetts where the contractor declared that they could not get composite lumber pressure treated, and if they did it would void the warranty. We ended up redesigning everything to remove any FRT composite lumber (including a truss as a header in an...
Celt83 - we're definitely using double studs for the bottom 2 floors - there's just no way to get the capacity we need in a 2x4 wall without. It was more of a question of have we considered the loads appropriately and do we need to drop the stud spacing as well.
I've never had a problem with treating the 5 spf as live load before, but I've got a stud that sees 4622 lbs (Dl+LL) compression and 54 lb-ft moment. It's also a 2x4 wall. It's slightly overstressed with both loads combined and a duration factor of 1.0.
I'm designing an interior wood bearing wall to support 3 floors and a roof, as well as the standard horizontal load of 5 psf. The code does not specify exactly what this horizontal load is, and how it should be combined with other loads. Since this is a wood wall, the duration factor of the...
