WWPA Design Suite
Something well worth preserving -- for those who occasionally design and then build their own wooden structures, that is
This is an incidental post, promulgated here in order to make it more certain that a very useful set of Excel-based freeware programs remain available to people over the long run.
At one time, the Western Wood Products Association (www.wwpa.org) commissioned an engineering firm to put together a set of programs that show what size of dimension lumber, and what kind of lumber fasteners, should be used in order to build safe, building code-consistent wooden structures. For a long time, the WWPA Design Suite was downloadable at no cost from the WWPA website. This is the message that now comes up when searching in WWPA’s resource library for the software:
I have no certain explanation why WWPA decided to stop making this very useful program set available to the general public, but I suspect it’s a reflection of the continued ‘professionalization’ of domestic tasks that used to be generally carried out by property owners themselves.
It took some time and effort, but I eventually found a single freeware distribution website that still makes the WWPA Design Suite available for direct download. If that lone link stops working, I’ve also placed an alternative dropbox link containing the program here.