Getting Started

Your First Wood Beam in 5 Minutes

A quickstart that walks an engineer from a new project to a finished wood beam calculation and report.

This quickstart takes you from an empty workspace to a solved NDS wood beam capacity check with a PDF report. If you have a ClearSpan account and can sign in, you are ready to start.

1. Create a project#

Calculations always live inside a project, so start there.

  1. Open Projects from the navigation.
  2. Create a new project and give it a name (for example, "Maple St. Residence").
  3. Open the project to land on its detail page, where you will add calcs.
Tip

You can also create the project later — when you save an unsaved beam, ClearSpan offers to save it into an existing project or spin up a new one on the spot.

2. Add a wood beam calc#

From the project, start a new wood beam calculation. This opens the engineer wood beam editor, an NDS capacity check that drives demands, capacity, and DCRs straight from the solver — there is no manual moment/shear entry.

The editor has three main areas:

  • Member & service conditions — span, section, plies, material, species, grade, brace spacing, and the wet-service / repetitive / incised adjustments.
  • Load cases — the demands the beam is checked against.
  • Section sweep — a collapsed table of candidate sections you can expand to compare.

3. Enter the member and span#

In Member & service conditions, set the span and pick a member. Sections come from two material families:

  • Sawn lumber — sizes like 2x10, 4x12, 6x8.
  • SCL (LVL / PSL / LSL) — engineered sizes like 1.75x11.875, 3.5x14.

Choose the species and grade for your member, set the number of plies, and toggle any service adjustments that apply. Edits re-solve automatically a moment after you stop typing.

4. Add load cases#

A capacity check needs demands. The fastest path is to import load cases from an existing beam analysis in the same project — ClearSpan copies its load patterns, combinations, cases, deflection limits, and span, while keeping your own member choice. To build loads from scratch instead, use the Beam Analysis editor. See Wood Beam Calcs and Load Criteria for the full workflow.

Each case shows moment (M), shear (V), bending DCR, shear DCR, deflection, and a deflection DCR, with a pass/fail status chip.

5. Read the results#

The sticky envelope strip at the top tracks the controlling bending, shear, and deflection DCRs and an overall pass/fail. A DCR at or below 1.0 passes; anything above 1.0 is shown in red. Expand the section sweep to compare candidate sections and pick a lighter or heavier member if needed.

When the member works, click Save run (or Save changes on an existing calc) to persist the design. See Beam Design & Analysis for a deeper tour of demands, capacity, and the sweep.

6. Generate the report#

With the calc saved, use Generate report PDF to produce the calculation report. After it exists, the same button reads Edit report PDF so you can refine the sections. You can also use Export PDF to print the editor view directly. See Reports and Report Templating for layout and content control.

Next steps#