Tonight I was thinking it might be kind of cool to enable an option for hip and ridge (cap) on hip roofs.

After about an hour of coding I generated this:



I've got the hip cap figured out at the eaves but I'm a little unsure how to terminate everything where the hips meet the ridge:

Talking to my wife today about how much time I devote to all of the different projects I'm constantly involved with, in particular the plugins and my plans to launch the much needed wall plugin.  I'm coming up on two years since I started the Truss Plugin and I am quite proud of how far it has progressed but I'm even more amazed at how much more there is yet to do.

As you all know I work a full time job and only get to this stuff in my free time which is pretty tough on the family since all my time and energy is devoted to my "work".

My wife feels like I need to cut back on something, which I can understand.

My work is simply work, it pays the bills and it is fairly stable and decent income.

My passion is my plugins and other structural and design programs (design.medeek.com) that I have created and continue to create.

The last couple of days I've taken a hard look at the numbers and realized that the volume of customers is pretty good (currently about 350 active truss plugin users) but definitely not in the thousands or what I would consider "high volume" or "mass market".  If it was in that range then I could easily offer the plugin at much lower pricing and it still could pay for the considerable time and effort that I put into it.

As it currently stands, given the number of customers or potential customers I think I'm seeing, the plugin(s) is more of a niche item and not so much a "mass market" item. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that both myself and my wife think that in order for me to devote as much time as I do to the plugins I need to figure out a way to make it compensate me better for that time.  The only two solutions I am seeing is increase the volume or increase the price.

My major argument up until now for increasing the price is that the plugin(s) are not finished nor polished products.  However this is sort of a chicken and egg problem, more money would theoretically allow me to devote more time to the development which would make the plugin(s) more valuable and worth the additional cost.

Any ideas are welcome.  Bottom line is I think there is a lot more that I have to add to the SketchUp community, I just got to figure out how to do it.

I'm a registered user of the truss plugin  but I don't see a flag at my location.  I have a paid serial number for the plugin....does that automatically register me or is there another step?

Regards

Making a slight detour back to the wood gusset plate question and nail spacing:


What I would like to compare is the following:





Same amount of nails in each test specimen. The tighter nail spacing allows for 66.6% the gusset length versus the 2 row configuration.


Any one want to venture a guess which one is stronger and by how much?


I just need to figure out a test rig and then load these two up and see what happens.


For a DF main member and OSB (7/16) I get 173.7 lbs per fastener (double shear) or a total of 1,389.6 lbs for eight 10d fasteners.


I'm wondering how much the connection will stretch at this design load (loaded in pure tension, parallel to grain of main member) and at what load will it fail, then compare the results from both configurations.

Version 1.9.5 - 07.11.2017
- Added energy/raised heels for quad fink truss (3 variant: wedge, slider and vertical w/ strut).
- Metal plate connectors now enabled for quad fink trusses.



This concludes the updates needed for common trusses.  I still have a number of updates for all the other truss types to bring them up to speed.