topic Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall? in Collaboration with other software

Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:40:43 GMT

Being a new user to AC, I'm still figuring out the best way of doing things. One of these is what objects to best use for timber framing in residential housing. From some experiments with the built-in timber member objects, and Objective even, I'm coming to the conclusion that little may beat the Wall tool for horizontal framing members, such as floor joists. All the snap points and guide lines are available (unlike objects) and the stretch and split tools all function easily. For angled ends I just convert a standard wall into a polywall first, prior to a split with an angled boundary joist. I can set up standard lumber sizes in Favourites.

Now, the issue is: I need to eventually produce a cutting list, complete with the angle of cut for non-square ends. The plan view of a joist represented with a polywall looks like the image attached.

The question is, can I, and how do I extract a value for the cut angles at each end of a polywall?

Thanks for any help! Pete.

Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:20:15 GMT

350 views. That's a lot of people interested in the answer. But alas, does no-one know it?

Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:05:52 GMT

Peter!

For a framing tool and cutting list your best bet might be to to use the Cadimage Wall-framing Tool.

http://www.cadimagetools.com/tools.aspx?id=4

It's a plugin: so more outlay. I haven't got it but maybe someone who uses it regularly could post with a review.

Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:17:44 GMT

I agree with Samovar. Even though it technically 'may' be possible to do something like this natively in ArchiCAD, the number of billable hours you would waste setting up the components and then manually building the timber framing (which would be horrendously labour intensive), you might as well get the cadimage solution and get on with doing some proper billable work!

Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:29:33 GMT

Cadimage Wall-Framing isn't suited to horizontal members, only vertical members (i.e.walls) as far as I can see. I'm after a horizontal framing member solution.

I'm not on the clock, so hours spent setting up and learning stuff isn't an issue. I've given myself a year of ArchiCAD self-study, and being a programmer and a builder, I'm happy to wrangle with difficult problems, in the name of getting to know the inside workings

Even so, I'm not wanting to waste them, so hours travelling down a dead end is something I'm hoping to avoid.

Re: Scheduling the angles of the cut ends of a poly wall?

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:16:35 GMT

Hi again, Peter.

That will teach me to speed-read your original post. I didn't see the bit that mentioned the floor joists!

ArchiCAD will do what you need, but you may find you will have to use library parts rather than walls, as I don't believe walls store the information about their end angles.

Investigate using the purlin12.gsm object found in the roof construction section of the library. This has the end cut angle parameters built in already which can be listed on a schedule. I have customised mine further by adding a drop-down list of common standard sizes, and also adding different cross-sectional symbols. Remember to change the subtype to beam and give the object a new name. Be aware if you mirror the object on plan, the cutends will become reversed in the schedule.

There are other objects that would do a similar job but I found all were lacking a particular feature I wanted, so I started with purlin12 and added the extra bits I needed.

There is actually a joist beam object in the US library (it's not in the INT library for some reason!) which has various cross sectional symbols, but doesn't have end angle adjustment. There may be something similar in your localised library, so check it out to see if it does what you want first.

Good luck!