I wrote a reply quite a while ago when the server was getting switched, so it has been lost in the ether. I'm not sure what I wrote, but it was surely poetic and profound.
Ken and Jordan, thanks for the replies.
Ken, so your models do show the buildings surviving? Do you have to tweak the model much to make things work? I don't know how tweakable these particular models are. The models I used to work on were crazy tweakable. Actually in my modeling class we took a real world problem, split the class into two groups and each group produced a perfectly valid model, with two very different conclusions. Hence my initial question and skepticism. And thanks for the enticement on the graduate work, but my previous graduate work burnt me out on homework.
Jordan, as a matter of fact the modeling I used to do was with soil, or really the stuff under the soil. And while the properties of wood may vary by a factor of 2 or 3, the properties of sand may vary by 12 orders of magnitude (like 1 to 1 billion). In general, the geologists would just say this way too complicated, and the engineers would say just take the median and call it in an assumption. The compromise would be stochastic modeling, which could probably be applied to structural FE models pretty easily.
I also like the idea of our cross-cultural tying joint exchange, and would definately support you Ken in your work. What about contacting the Guild or your Fellowship to see if they would be interested in publishing a series of articles or book or something. The SU models would be great as well.
It would be great to hear from more engineers on this subject. It seems as though the Guild is slowly getting through studying and analyzing trusses, chuches, and bridges (the articles seen in the past few years in Timberframing). But I don't know whether those lowly capes and colonials and Dutch barns and so on have been looked at by engineers.
On an entirely separate note...Will, I haven't seen too many English barns in western Mass (although they are certainly around), but the ones that I've seen all have common rafters, and often principal purlins. Again, I'm not sure whether these are just later examples of English barns, or if it's a regional thing. I'll ask Jack. I did ask him whether he had ever seen a historic example of a principal rafter bearing on the end grain of a post (dropped plates I guess you'd call it, as most frames are today), and he said no. Those thing scare me.
Brad
