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I recently tried designing a safe deck myself and found it quite interesting. I did my design in ZWCAD, but the logic behind the design process should apply to all kinds of CAD software. If you're interested in designing one yourself, feel free to download the sample drawings here . Okay, here's how to design a safe deck. Step 1. Prepare a plan of your house and its surroundings. Then, decide where to locate the deck and the basic shape of it, based on the plan. Step 2. Outline the shape of the safe deck, which will be the base of your design. At this stage, your top consideration should be practicality. For example, if the ground were noticeably uneven, consider designing a multi-level deck. Step 3. Draw the dividing lines on the deck to represent the placement of the wood. And don't forget to add dimensions to your design. For those who also use ZWCAD, you can use the Super Hatch function to texturize the deck with realistic wood images, to make it easier to read. Step 4. Create the layout of the supporting pillars. You should allow for the moving load on the deck, which means the distance between two pillars is usually about 3 to 4 meters. In ZWCAD, you can quickly place the pillars with the Array function - first, select the pillar as the basic object, then set the distances on the X and Y axes. Step 5. Design the elevation, which is mainly to show the height differences of the deck and its railings. Note that the deck should be lower than the house floor to prevent water from flowing back into the house during rainy days. As for the railings, the height is suggested to be 1 meter. Step 6. Insert your title block in the layout space to display the necessary information, such as materials and size. Then, decide the paper size for printing out the layout. In this case, I think A3 is just fine. With the printed layout, now you can contact your local contractors and discuss it with them. That's the whole process of designing a safe deck!

Hello all, I work for a Firm that does Commercial Architectural Drafting and I am currently looking for a simple way to add a lisp routine that allows us to automatically calculate New doors on Floor plans and Parking Spaces on site plans that we create. Reason being that we are just looking for a faster way to do this without counting each individual door or parking space to save time and energy. Not sure if this is possible because I do not have extensive knowledge in Lisp Routines but this seemed like the right place to ask. If anyone knows anything about this that would be helpful. Thank you and have a great day.

ACAD Architecture 2011: I have a couple of 3d walls with high and low openings. Specifically one is an "Opening" with a sill at 0'-0" and head at 2'-6", and the other is a "Window" with a Sill at 3'-6" and a Head at 7'-0". Both cannot be shown with a single cut plane. Since the cut plan can only be set to one elevation, is there any way to show both openings? Thank you, Tom.