Thanks for the thread MTF!
I think it was mentioned in the other thread on braces, but the back-issues (#62, 63, 64 I think) of the tfg newsletter have excellent articles on braces working in tension and compression. A person built (for his thesis?) real timber frames (one and two story, oak and pine) and instrumented them with load cells, and pushed on them with hydraulics to obtain stiffness #'s, and ultimately pushed them to failure. It's a very scientific analysis. The whole set of back issues is available on DVD here on this web site. I am not associated with the tfg in any way, but I was happy to buy these back issues for the wealth of information they contained, and I figured some of that $ might help support this discussion forum.
Don't know if it's already been mentioned in this thread, but the post-to-beam joint that completes the triangle formed by the "brace, post, and beam" is one that needs to be carefully looked at too. The smaller the brace, the more stress this joint will see under wind loads, etc.
