I had an email discussion with one of the ClearCalcs people last year about this…
Has there been any movement on modifying the steel beam selector options? The only way to currently filter steel is by entering max width and max depth values. Most steel beams are actually taller than their nominal series depth, which surely complicates this a bit. For example, W12x22 is 12.3" tall.
This isn’t a big need, but it would feel more user-friendly if we could toggle the beam series that we were looking to use rather than entering a specific numerical maximum. Many typical smaller jobs have steel varying from W8 to W12 so it would be convenient to toggle those three only. Alternately/additionally, a weight limit would be a great filter too.
And lastly, steel size/member settings would be another handy user-specific saved preference if that was ever in the cards for the programmers. There are less than 20 beams that I consider for the vast majority of projects.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for bringing this up. Totally understand with the filter - we needed to take a decision whether we would filter based on actual or nominal depth, and ultimately went with the actual depth as we felt it would be more undesirable to have a beam deeper than you expected show up when you filter by depth.
That said, you can easily filter to specific W series by using the filter bar - see below where I’ve typed W8 to see all the W8 series:
As for saving sections - this sounds like a perfect use case for our preferred sections! Have you had a chance to try those?
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Ha! Sometimes the answers are right in front of me. Typing in W8 or whatever is the simple answer I didn’t know I already had access to.
That said, reversing the display order to lightest-to-heaviest would effectively shift all those shapes that are never used out of view.
To go with that, a potential improvement would be an option, potentially a clickable box, that toggles through all sections and only the sections that work.
Hey Jesse, thanks for the build here. We definitely want to improve these further with a ‘works’ and ‘doesn’t work’ solution, as well as the ability to sort by your choice of column as Jim has mentioned. We’ll be making some improvements overall to how we handle tables and lists in the second half of this year and I’m hoping to tackle this as part of that.
The best steel beam calculator I have used is Ram SBeam. It will give you the most efficient section based on analysis and specific limitations you put on height and width. This would be so much better than having to scroll through beams that don’t work. Maybe at least have the calculator not show beams that don’t work so its easier to find a beam section that works.
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