TECHNICAL STUFF

 

This is the post that should have come before the last one🙄

Q. Explain the brick bonding here.

A. It's a half-brick wall in Stretcher Bond (face side) There is a stabilising pier on the other side, one brick wide, depth unknown. The alternating courses that reveal this pier are:

Course 1. 3/4, 1/2, 3/4
Course 2. Two headers

The rest of the wall is standard stretcher bond with half lap. The three quarters are there to create quarter lap, so that the half-brick can sit on the joint between the two headers.

I learnt to spot this kind of thing 50 years ago during a crash course in bricklaying. It's stuck with me ever since and is a source of great joy.

 

 

A brickwork exercise that I gave to my students at the University of Zimbabwe about 40 years ago. It's designed to be challenging while using a small number of bricks and without straying into fancy decorative brickwork.

The brick pier is similar to the one I showed in my previous post, but viewed from the other side. The drawing is Rotring pen on bond paper, using a plastic A3 drawing board. State of the art tech in my view, at the time. Photocopiers had recently improved, a lot. So that was my way to produce handouts for the class. Desktop publishing was hardly a thing yet. Cut and paste still meant scissors and glue. But it was effective.

 

 

This is my basic Sash Window family (Revit component) with the host wall hidden. In this version, I have a Yes/No switch for "Equal Height" (meaning "are the top and bottom sashes equal height? Tick the box for yes")

If this is unticked, the "Lower Height" parameter comes into play and the top sash height is calculated accordingly. I am in process of rationalising the parameters in this Family. At the moment it's too complex for the end user.

An experienced user should be in charge of managing all the window families for a project, but also it's important to to strike a balance between parametric, and manual adjustment. I'm picking up this work after a couple of years and even I get confused.

For now it's about deciding on the different configurations I need and building the nested components, but after that I will have to take a serious look at usability.

 

I made these entourage families long ago, 2013 I think. I challenged my followers to share some similar saying I would make more in response. I did get a taker, and the results have been in the GAJ Revit library ever since. These days many people are using Enscape or similar, making this type of family less useful.

The download links on my blog have been dead for ages and I'm aware that many people have been requesting access. To my shame, I never got around to this. Recently a direct appeal on LinkedIn prompted me to take another look.

I sometimes use RFA files to store collections of families. More lightweight than project files for sharing purposes and some other advantages when dealing with modular collections. Most of these are directly based on CAD files that I had accumulated 30+ years ago. In some cases I embedded the CAD file with a visibility switch to give the option of some interior detail.

They do not rotate to be perpendicular to the camera direction, so one option is to copy- rotate the extrusion by 90 degrees. They can still be useful if you don't want a photo-tendered look.

Some of the extrusions have far too many segments. I always intended to come back and optimise, but it never happened. I did manage to edit most of them so the feet sit convincingly on the ground instead of the tippytoes effect you get when tracing blindly from photos.