Hi
I am designing a 'barnage' structure to build at my house here in Dunedin, New Zealand using the traditional timber framing techniques gleened from Ted Bensons fine books. However here in New Zealand we are prone to earthquakes (much like California I suppose?)and as timber framing does not have a history here our council requires full bracing schedules to be presented with the plans and as the size of the individual members I plan to use and their connections to each other are beyond the scope of our 3604 building code (which covers stud frame and masonry buildings)each structure has to be individually engineered.
Are there any good resources out there which could accompany my plans to my local city council for timber spans, loadings, bracing units achieved etc that are in metric and that the good council engineers can refer to without having to convert from imperial (which I'm sure they will be reluctant to do).
Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Hi Mike

I'm not quite sure why you don't just produce a metric set of drawings and calc everything in metric from the get-go. However, assuming that you've already considered this (or that I'm just missing something), you might consider looking a little further north to your metric Canada colleagues: there are some good references available from the Canadian Wood Council, online at www.cwc.ca In particular, the Wood Reference Handbook is a good read. (We're in an active seismic area here in BC too)

BUT, don't forget to untangle your wood species from the calculation process: make sure you are using the correct timber properties, because NZ doesn't share a lot of timber species with Canada.

By the way, you'll be cheered to know that there is a small but significant Kiwi tradition of timber framing, and there are a couple of active framers down there too.

Best of luck with your project!

Gord

Hi Gord
Thanks for the reply. Have since visited the C.W.C webpage - very informative- unfortunately the handbook you recommended is temporarily out of stock, sounds like a good one that could be applicable to our conditions down here so I'll definately keep an eye out for it.

So far have produced three and a half drafts of project and was almost at a final draft stage when I found the timber cad download on this site. Am presently stumbling my way through that and in a couple of weeks should have produced a full set of drawings. You are right, I should calc my metric bracing schedule etc from these and I endeavour to as soon as I work out how!

Once again thank you.

Regards,
Mark.

Mark if you need any help with TimberCAD please post your questions in the software forum and drop me an email to let me know there is a pending question on the forum. It's quite robust but not well documented. Good Luck. Oh, by the way, we did create a metric version of it at one time. If you're interested we could see if Ed could dredge up the functions that make it metric.