Truss Design Software

Can anyone recommend some truss design software that is useful for analyzing timber trusses? I am not looking to replace the engineer just be able to easily run calcs in house on various options as frame designs evolve. Freeware would be best...

Dan,

I found this software to be helpful. (As you say, to evaluate various options... not to replace the engineer.) The UI is very straightforward and the evaluation version is free. The limitation of the evaluation version is that the nodes (or members?) are limited to something like 20 or 30 elements. If your truss is symmetric, using the proper constraints, you could effectively model a truss with twice the number of nodes.

http://www.engilab.com/beam2d_ml.htm

Thomas