Do the nails carry a hung wall panel, and how few can act before they fail?

What it found

Follows the weight of a lifted house-panellift wall panel down its nail load path. The sheathing-to-top-plate 8d nails at 6 in carry 17–31 lb each, 0.20–0.36 of the 84 lb adjusted lateral value from the yield-limit equations, if they share the load; the closed panel reaches capacity when about 40% of the top row acts (open: about 25%). Field nails are at 0.04. A bare frame hung by its top plate hangs about 24 lb per stud from end-grain withdrawal, which the NDS gives no design value for, so it is credited zero. Stylised: nail inputs are assumed, load sharing is uniform, and slip and the lift hardware are not modelled.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Open-source residential construction

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.