We've had good luck with the HP DesignJet T520 36" plotter.
Relatively inexpensive, and hasn't required much in the way of maintenance. We've had ours over 10 years.
My experience with these has been that you really want to deal with the horizontal deflection by making the beam very stiff. Using cantilevered columns typically won't work.
By the time you make the beam stiff enough to limit the horizontal deflection (say 1/2" at the roller, which amounts to...
I personally am going to cut the OP some slack. While I agree that we shouldn't exceed 1.0 and it is easy to correct for new construction, it gives me exactly zero heartburn, especially for wood construction. I've evaluated enough existing wood structures that are 200% 'overstressed' and are...
Agree with pham. For the type of work I do and enjoy, I have very little leverage on the contract terms, especially for public work.
If I can't get coverage, the ship has sunk.
What will offer stiffness is the roof sheathing. At an 8:12 pitch, depending on the length of the room, the roof will act as a folded-plate spanning to the end walls, whether you design it this way or not. There's an older thread with a link to a paper on folded plate designs.
I'm not...
And they typically put it on the contractor to pull the appropriate information out of sheets and sheets of typical details and schedules that cover every imaginable situation, most of which aren't applicable to the project.
Another data point. There was a similar thread several years back. At that time, I went back and looked at many of our previous designs with fixed and pinned connections. Due to the stiffness of the beams, in no case did we discover any problems with the column design with the minimal moment...
