Post and beam barn

[putt_putt_green]

A guy in my area just had a post and beam gambrell barn built to imitate the barns built during the 19th century in our area. He did a presentation on it for the historical society. 1st barn built in the area since 1949 using post and beam construction. The barn is 30' wide, 54' long, and 30' high. The beams were huge, thanks to today's building codes. I'd say on average, 3 times the volume of wood to build the post and beam construction. The outside is painted cedar vertical boards. Total cost was only around $300,000 (no typo). A nice house can be bought for less than $300,000 in my area. No tractor in the barn either.

 

[schmism]

The beams were huge, thanks to today's building codes.

As an engineer that worked in the wood truss industry for the past 5.5 years, i can tell you there is nothing in the current codes that specifically address the sizeing of the beams.

There is no current design software out there to analyze the post and beam design.

What current code probably required was the structure be designed by a structural engineer to satisfy the local building code officials. As such the engineer was likely very conservative in his analysis's having no good tools to analyze the behavior of the joints. thus resulting in the (what seems to be) overly large beams.

In addition grading rules for beams means that they generally fare much worse in terms of properties than similar sized ganged material of standard size. (a 6x10 beam is assigned a value that is less than a 4ply 2x10 beam)