Residential Structural Engineering: Beam Calculator for Sawn Lumber

[medeek]

I've recently started doing a lot more residential structural engineering for local clients and the first thing that I realized was that I was lacking a good beam calculator. I do have a number of spreadsheet calculators but I've found them hard to program and once I do have them programmed any changes are tedious since the equations in Excel are hard to follow (I know VBA can be used in macros).

To that end, I've started working on a web based beam calculator that will be able to handle sawn lumber, glulam and structural composite lumber, programmed in Perl/HTML/Javascript.

It is still a work in progress however the "sawn lumber" option should now give a full output. I will be adding in the PDF output as time allows and also the other beam types listed above.

Currently the selection of lumber species is also somewhat limited however adding new species is simply a matter of adding the appropriate values from the NDS into the database. If there is a particular species or grade you would like added please advise.

Any feedback, positive or negative is always appreciated.

The beam calculator is currently located here: http://design.medeek.com/resources/beam/beam_calculator.pl

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I'm sorry you are not finding help at the moment. Is there any additional information you can share with us?

 

[henneh]

Nice script. You might get a bit more response on places like eng-tips if you want more feedback. I'd say the ability to add point loads would be nice, you probably don't see too many of those in residential properties though.