Beiträge von jmiller

I don't have much experience with HSB, but I used Cadwork at my old job and now own a copy of Dietrichs (and am very happy with the switch).

The main draw I see towards HSB would be the familiarity with the AutoCAD environment, which most of us know quite well. However, Dietrich's is so easy to become productive quickly on (just hours for standard style frames) that it doesn't really matter. I am constantly wishing their were more Dietrich's style commands in options in AutoCAD when I have to go back and use it now.

I would think sticking to a software written specifically for timber construction by those in the industry would be the way to go (HSB seems to be the Swiss Army Knife approach?)

Joe

GSView is a great bit of free open source software that can open PDFs and other Post-script based documents (PS, EPS, etc) and convert them to jpgs, tiffs, gifs, etc. It does it with almost no resolution loss, so, you can get some very detailed JPGs. Even opens some corrupted PDFs the Adobe can't handle.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/

Joe

It seems I am always importing DXFs from structural analysis softwares as well as Dietrich's into AutoCAD, and the scale is never right. I have found, after you insert the object into autocad to any scale, that you can then use the "SCALE" command and get things just right.

Process is:
-insert the object(s)
-invoke the SCALE command
-select all of the objects you want to scale
-specify a base point (choose a point on the corner of an object. I typically do a bottom of a post)
-rather than enter a scale factor, hit R for reference
-select two points that you know the true distance between. two points across the depth of a timber, or the distance from one post to the next, etc.
-enter the new length. This is the length you want that dimension you just measured to be. if you select two points on the face of a timber, than the depth of the timber, or, distance between two posts, or whatever.

This process will always scale everything to as many decimal places as I've seen listed, so it is quite accurate (rather than manually typing in some contrived scale factor). It does require you to know the distance between two points, however.

Joe

For standard beam sizes, getting that information is, for the most part, trivial. For full cross sections, a timber list to excel would work great.

But, at a post connection, where there is a housing, tenon, and peg holes, the moment of inertia of the post is not the same as the full sized post, hence it has a lower bending capacity. Quantifying that number, which needs to be done in some cases, it time consuming, is all.

Or am I the only one who does that check?

Much obliged.

Being able to generate a list from a section that had cross sectional information (area, moment of inertia) for a member would be great.

For heavily loaded timbers, checking the capacity of reduced cross sections is a must, and calculating this information, while quite simple numerically, is tedious. For now, I have been generating a dxf of a section, importing it into autocad, turning it into a region, and then using the "massprop" command to get the required info. Being able to cut this step out would save a lot of time.