I made a material change from a steel beam to a wood beam and found that the calculation is slightly different than if I started a wood beam from scratch. Specifically, the converted wood beam has an option to use the “repeating member” toggle whereas a new wood beam does not. I didn’t look much further but will make a point to avoid the conversion option for now.
Hi James,
Thanks for the detail, that makes total sense and you’ve actually diagnosed it correctly.
When you use Change material (in this case steel beam to wood beam), some inputs don’t carry across cleanly between templates. What you’re seeing, the repeating member toggle showing up on a converted wood beam when it wouldn’t appear on one created from scratch, is a result of that mismatch. It can affect the calculation, so the discrepancy you noticed is real and not a misread on your end.
This is a known limitation of the Change material flow. For now, starting a fresh wood beam calculation is the safer approach for one-off changes, which it sounds like you’re already doing.
If you ever need to do this across many sheets at once, feel free to reach back out and I can help run it through a more reliable conversion process on our end.