I haven’t designed a 10’ high wall in 2x4 in probably a decade. It’s nearly impossible to keep the walls straight as the studs season and the end product usually looks bad to awful.
From: Andy Heigley [mailto:aheigley@jgaeng.com]
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 10:32 AM
To: Seaint
Subject: Wood interior wall studs
Hello all:
I just want to get some feedback from other engineers about designing interior load-bearing wood wall studs. When designing the walls, I normally check two load combinations:
1) DL + LL +LLr
2) DL +0.75LL + 0.75LLr + 0.75W (with W = 5.0 psf interior horizontal partition load; I typically use a Cd=1.0 if I am just supporting floor live and dead load. And a Cd=1.15 when carrying roof loads in addition to the floor live and dead loads. I think the use of Cd=1.6 seems less conservative when you are dealing with large axial loads, particularly in a multi-story buildng.)
A contractor is battling me over some stud sizes b/c the stud height is about 10’-0” and for 2x4’s once you add the horizontal loading, in the second combination above, it significantly reduces the axial capacity. His engineer doesn’t check the second loading listed above.
I just want to get some other people’s opinion on what they check in your own design.
Thanks,
Andrew Heigley, PE