During beam design, it tells me I have an illegal framing error on beam 46. See layout below. I don't know which slab opening it doesn't like, but I also don't know a better way to draw them. One end of 46 is held by a small cantilever. On a related note, is there a way to troubleshoot these types of errors without having to "design all" beams and wait for that process each and every time? I've had to wait for all the beams to design several times to get through a handful of errors, and more so for ones like this that I can't figure out.
I don't see beam 46 in your image but I made some notes for some things that might be problematic:
Beam 46 is vertical in that image, towards the center of the screen shot, and lands on the cantilever end of the red 35 lateral beam. I already tried combining the openings on either side of beam 46 but this did not help. As for your comment about the beam number label indicating a slightly off 90 degree beam, this cannot be true because I used exactly 90 degrees when generating some of these with the off-grid option (e.g. from col, 90 degrees). I have a lot of beams with the labels on the other side.
When you add a beam at an angle the program calculates a far end point where the beam vector intersects something. If there is a snap point already in the model (a column, grid intersection, beam end, wall end, etc) at that point or very close to it, then the program will snap to the existing point instead. This sometimes leads to beam and 90.01 deg or similar. While that is not necessarily a problem, I have seen it lead to illegal framing or polygon errors. In order to get the beam straight, the original snap point might have to be moved.
Answer Verified By: Justine Brakefield
Thank you, that is not something I would have known. I think the problem is fixed.