Hi Jim,
I suppose that your difficulty might stem at least in part from a perceived or real need to draw demarcation lines between the various levels of services that you can legitimately provide to customers and those beyond which your current experience or level of qualification prohibit or at least advise you to proceed with caution.
As Dirty Harry says – “A man’s got to know his limitations”.
Your quandary seems in large part to lie in deciding how and where to draw the line in order to minimise design recycle and potential additional cost to clients.
Design of timber frames is not necessarily a calculation driven process. Provided there are some traditional (proven) patterns that you can copy or a design code that you can follow then an engineering review and stamping might be seen more as a legal and risk liability and responsibility compliance formality at the end of the design process rather than a hurdle which must be crossed during this process.
So what happens when there are no examples to follow or the rule book runs out ? Clearly an analytical ability or maybe even a test programme could help you to confirm or deny suppositions made during design.
Teenagers are frequently heard to complain that various parts of their anatomy are too big, small, tall, short, fat, thin, ugly, beautiful, boring, charismatic, etc. i.e. they see themselves as a collection of individual bits which either make the grade or not. Thankfully as adults we see ourselves more as a whole person better able to make allowances for a person being blessed with a hooked nose (Caesar), sticky out ears (HRH) or one leg longer than the other (Scots Haggis). Much the same is true for buildings of which a timber frame might just be seen as a skeletal component. Some animals e.g. ants and beetles have chosen to forego on having a skeleton altogether in favour of employing an external monocoque shell. This approach could be likened to the use of stress skin panels or application of weather boarding on a building which if well designed could in large part make up for all sorts of timber frame shortcomings and indeed even make the timber frame totally redundant.
The acceptance or rejectance of a design does therefore rely on the maturity and experience of the beholder together with the moral, commercial and legislative requirements that might need to be prudently demonstrated, in order to reduce personal and commercial risks associated with a particular design and most importantly the operational safety consequencies associated with same.
I shall close with a seasonal “D R ism” –
“The man, who doesn’t know, what he doesn’t know, is a very dangerous person indeed !
Regards
Ken Hume P.Eng.
