Best Method of Creating Beam Pocket At Top of Concrete Wall

[Darrellx]

Using a wall niche to create a beam pocket at the top of a concrete wall mostly works.  But it seems since the niche usually has 4 sides, the top doesn't render perfectly in doll house view (given it will probably be mostly hidden by the top plate, etc.

 

 

Just wondering if there is any way to fix this or is there a better method of including a pocket for a beam?

 

Example using wall niche attached.

beam_pocket.plan

[solver]

Think about how a Pony Wall might be used.

 

[Darrellx]

Thanks Eric, worked great and got me to play a little more with pony walls, which I haven't needed (or known I needed).

 

For reference to others, think the easy steps are:

1) Choose the section of wall where pocket is desired

2) inserts wall breaks where the pocked will be

3) Select that new small section of wall

4) Change the wall settings under "Wall Type"

  -check "Pony Wall"

  -"Define" a new wall type by copying the foundation wall to a wall as thick as the thickness of wall remaining with the pocket

  -change "Align Pony Wall at" setting if the pocket is on the wrong side of the wall

[solver]

 

[Darrellx]

Just noticed that with the pony wall and the same size sill plate, the sill plate tries to stay centered on the upper pony wall, so you get this:

 

Since the sill plate can be specified per wall section, I guess I could just make it(the sill plate) the same as the remaining part of the concrete at the pocket like this:

 Not that anyone would never notch out the plate above the pocket in practice.

 

Is it maybe possible to use the pony wall but specify a wall type that has some type of "invisible" layer with finite thickness (so the total thickness of the upper part of the pony wall still equals the thickness of the lower part)?

[Darrellx]

Adding a layer of 4" Glass Standard to the concrete layer wall type definition for the top part of the pony wall seemed to work to center the sill and everything still seems to render nicely:

  

 

 

 

Is some better named material more appropriate for this purpose like "air"?

 

[solver]

Clear materials like glass and Opening No Material render correctly in Standard views, but not in Vector views.

 

I would just edit the framing after everything else is correct. Delete the short piece and one of the other pieces, then select the remaining one and extend it across.

[Darrellx]

good point.

 

Also, just curious if the full CA product has a different way of doing this?

 

I tend to wish the wall niche method would have worked since that seems most straight forward to me.  I think their could be a few rendering improvements with the wall niche.

 

Here is a comparison between a window opening in a pony wall and a wall niche in a pony wall.  Seems like it (the wall niche) could handle this edge case better and then might have worked here for the packet also.

 

 

What it seems is that if the wall structure has a layer at the same depth into the wall as the wall niche depth then things render correctly.

 

So using the pony wall idea with a material that has two layers with a boundary at the pocket depth (like my concrete + standard glass settings) and placing a wall niche at the same location produces this (sill will be located properly because total thickness of upper pony wall is the same as the rest of the stem walls):

 

 

Only issue with using the pony wall in the first place is that in the back-clipped cross section only cutting through the pocket you can see a boundary between upper and lower walls, which seems to be the case even using the simple single top layer pony wall solution:

Not too big of deal, just seems like all this is a work around for a wall niche that could work a little better in a single layer material when cutting through (or bounding) the horizontal wall boundaries. 

 

 

 

[solver]

2 hours ago, Darrellx said:

if the full CA product has a different way of doing this?

 

It does, but it's not better, just different with its own problems.