UMASS: Building Materials and Wood Technology

[Daddymem]

I took a class called Architectural Blueprint Takeoff and Estimating at UMASS Amherst as part of my Engineering degree.  They have a very active wood framing group.  Here is a link to some of their documents, enjoy.  Many topics have been discussed right here on this Board.

http://www.umass.edu/bmatwt/publications/by_title.html

Paul Fisette taught my course, his articles are as down to earth as he is (think Norm on This Old House in both appearance and personality).  Sprinkled in are a number of articles from science journals and research, don't get put off by those.

[Amanda_931]

The kind of thing that we may have wondered about (how good is OSB, how do people test it) might be the translation of this one into standard English, but some of the titles are enough to put one off forever.  

It sounds as bad as stuff the folklorists and anthropologists were writing about "functional" anythings in the 60's.  Not sure that we ever knew exactly what anyone (even ourselves) meant by functional, but by gosh it sounded like it might be impressive.  Hopefully to our professors.

A Stochastic Plasticity Approach to Strength Modeling of Strand-based Wood Composites

[conohawk]

Thanks for the very helpful link, Daddymem.

Among the documents, this one, about calculating beam and header sizes, is quite excellent:

http://www.umass.edu/bmatwt/publications/articles/calculating_loads_on_headers_and_beams.html

[John Raabe]

Very good diagrams there. Thanks for the link.