Truss manufacturers will usually provide structural drawings for your house using their trusses, if you talk to the lumberyard that sells them. You bring floorplans, and they'll design the trusses to support it.
I know this is a little buried - but I own a truss manufacturing operation and I'd totally recommend finding one to talk to. If you can find drawings, or sometimes even just sketch out a floorplan (we frequently build out barns or other simple structures based on literal napkin drawings) we'll give you a layout of all the trusses, joists and beams that you could take and just stick frame it yourself based off. Naturally we're here to sell trusses, but I think most plants like us are always down to help out folks in the community if we've got the time.
Is the price of a truss fairly linear or is there a length where the price starts to really accelerate? I'm considering building a 30'x60' pole barn with 18" or 24" eaves making the trusses 33' or 34' long.
It's fairly linear for the same kind of truss, like say a 15 foot span to a 20 foot span - just think bigger triangle. Past a certain point, in order to support the shear/wind/snow loads across a span requires increasingly higher grades and width of lumber and you start getting into non-linear territory. Pole barns are an extremely common order for truss plants, and that size should be pretty standard. In single family houses, though, you start getting into "features" pretty quick which affect the price quite a bit, think ceiling trays, HVAC platforms and so on, so you're pretty quickly into some nonlinear territory there as well.
The hard truth about the trades is you need to start young, while you're body is able to take the punishment, so you have time to learn the skills to take a less punishing senior/ownership role by the time your back/legs/arms start to give out. This isn't insurmountable, but it needs to be planned for.
Look for jobs where your background gives you more of a leg up, and are done indoors, with a stronger emphasis on health and safety.
Things like:
Industrial Electrical
Automation Technician
Machine Operator
Millwright
Avoid jobs done for small crews with a more cowboy attitude, like most residential trades.
This is absolutely true. I spend some time in trades before tech. I recall my first day, squeezing into a rocky and mildewy crawl space with barely enough room to flip over, only to fix up some busted plumbing using some very strong smelling chemicals with little ventilation. I knew then this wasn’t going to be a long term fit for me.
Trades work can absolutely destroy you. It’s also not really avoidable with good ergonomics - there are no good ergonomics. Some situations are just going to require you to do really physically awkward uncomfortable things to get the job done. There’s also the general slow erosion of health. Exposure to chemicals, saw dust, metal shavings, things getting in your eyes, getting poked by random nails, rolling over onto a bit of glass, tweaking your back trying to prevent a piece of lumber sliding off the roof, being constantly dehydrated and sunburned, etc. There is a reason tradesmen look like tradesmen. It’s the toll they pay.
That seems to match with a shutter vendor that says "50 microsecond rise time 1.3 millisecond fall time". So I guess 'rising' is going dark, and 'falling' is going clear.
Or 'rising' means changing the natural state of the crystal (thus rotating 90° the polarization), and 'falling'... well, falling back to the natural resting state. It makes some sense that falling back when unenergized is slower than rising.
Now it'd be interesting to know what happens during rise and fall time. Progressive linear polarization? Waiting time until the crystal reacts?
In the grocery retail business, the trade press is free if you work for a retailer, and very expensive as a wholesaler. The subscription also comes with listing in a registry, moving the expense to the marketing budget.
As a buyer in much smaller part of the supply chain, my experience is that no-one who uses the supply chain wants a simpler supply chain, they want to meet their business goals. If you use software to simplify your supply chain, you'll use that to do more complex things with the supply chain until the gains are erased.
The USDA Agricultural marketing service has an incredible amount of frequently updated data and reports about the movement and price of agricultural commodities through the supply chain.
