The Cowled Engineer

I used to work as a timber frame and truss detailer before becoming an engineer.  During that period of my life, I prepared shop drawings for the prenailed timber frames of many homes around South East Queensland.  As a detailer, I had to know exactly where to place studs in order to make it easier for the various trades on site to do their work.  For example, plumbers wanted to have blocking directly behind the toilet cistern, so I would detail a decent sized piece of timber in the right spot. When it came to plybrace, I always provided an extra stud at the join between two sheets of bracing (as in the photo above).  As I recall, chippies wanted the extra stud so that they could nail off the sheet without worrying that the nails might miss the stud.  As one chippie told me recently, " If your stud is out by a poofteenth, all your nails are going to miss. "  This double stud detail was, and still is, perceived as best practice. Unfortunately, the double stud deta