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The way doors are built and sized


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Industrially produced doors are constructed pretty much the same way everywhere but unfortunately the standard of size reporting varies rather much by country/continent.

 

In some countries industry door and window "module" sizes are used, eg. a 10+3x21M double door would have a 1310mm wide and a 2110mm high rough opening, with 10+3 division in the leaves. The door frame outer dimensions would be 1280 and 2080mm. The jamb width, depth and structure are specified as is the threshold type, height etc. From this information the manufacturer deducts the actual, final leaf size(s). This system is an approach from a different direction.

 

Therefore, if the components affect the outer dimensions, the user should be able to lock the rough opening, depending on which sizing method is used. A bit like with the stair tool (but with better functionality...)

 

Nothing like a wrong sized door opening cast into concrete...especially if too small  :-)

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 1 year later...

Hello Ted.

After looking for a solution to this same issue since 2001. I think I have stumbled upon a cleaver solution, which is working for me.😃 

 

Here is my goal and what I needed to achieve. I think we were trying to achieve the same goal.

 

I have a 36" wide x 96" tall interior door (these are the dimensions of the slab) with a 0.75" jamb and a 0.25" shim gap, VW calculated the ROs to be 38" wide x 97" tall... which is not how doors are made. Needless to say, GCs love our Nominal Size info in our schedules (very easy to order from) but the Framers in the field were very frustrated with the RO info in our schedules, which always undersized the door RO heights.

 

Your idea of using a threshold made perfect sense to me, since we needed to account for the 1" air gap below the slab that is standard in the USA. Thresholds are added to the door height, not removed from the slab height.

 

Straight to the point, here is the solution that is working for me.  (VW2020)

I changed my database header of my door schedule to the following:

=('Door'.'ROHeight')+('Door'.'ThresholdZoffset')

Then in the door object, I checked 'include threshold', set all values to 0 and made the Z offset 1"

Then I re-calced my worksheet and it worked perfectly.

 

And of course, here is the long story.

The hardest part for me was trying to figure out what to put in the database header.  I initially tried =('Door'.'ROHeight')+1, to see if adding a number up there would work. It did, but that added 1 foot to the RO height (not 1") and it applied to all doors. I switched to 1/12 to convert back to inches but it still added the value to every door, which was not my goal. But at least I got to understand the logic of how the worksheet was thinking. I then tired to use a one of the user fields to see if I could pad the number by 1", but the worksheet would just show #VALUE!.  grrrr. clearly it did not like the equation =('Door'.'ROHeight')+(Door.UserFld1) and it took me a while to figure out why.  The after about an hour of seaching, I discovered that ('Door'.'ROHeight') is a dimension field in the object where as (Door.UserFld1) is a text field in the object. You can't add numbers to text, even if the text is a number. Go figure.  So then I looked back at the threshold info in the door object and figured some of those values should work in the database header, but only if I could find out what the heck they were called. I did a little forum searching and saw that Plug-in Manager offered some clues. Drilling down into the door object, I saw that there were some parameters related to thresholds that were 'dimensional' fields. I tried ThreshNose as a dimension type, and sure enough it worked, as did ThresholdZOffset. The Names are the same as the criteria for the database headers. All in all it took a few hours to figure it out, but your initial post really helped me look deeper for a solution. I went back to VW 2018 and sure enough it worked in that verison too, so I am a bit frustrated that it took so long to figure this out, especially knowing that a solution existed all this time. Thank you for the original post. Let me know if this solution works for you.

 

 

Plug-in Manager.jpg

Customize Plugin.jpg

Door Schedule.jpg

Edited by VellumDesignBuild
typo
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Shortly after my original post on this subject, one of the engineers at Vectorworks helped me find this same fix.  Since then I have used it in all versions successfully.  I use a 1" tall threshold z-offset with no other parameters for interior doors to get the needed 1" space under the door for interior doors, and I use a 1 1/4" high z-offset for my 1 1/4" thick aluminum adjustable door sills for exterior doors, with the full threshold info filled out for the thresholds we typically use.  The only remaining issue is that the drawing still shows the jamb and trim only coming down to the phantom threshold, not all the way to the floor.  At least the schedules are now correct.  I think VW still needs to fix this in their programming, and not expect us to continue to "work around".

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Hi

On the subject of the door settings dialog box, when I try to confirm my settings, I'm finding the dialog box is too tall for my screen and monitor so I cant get to the bottom of the box to  click ok. It seems I can adjust the width of the dialog box but not the height? Can any one help as it's stopping me from adding a door with Style -Glazing class glass panels.

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Dianna A, I find it much easier to select the Settings box near the top of the object info window, which allows you to address each area of settings individualy.  You can also do this globally, by first selecting the "magic wand" tool, the selecting any door, then go to "settings", and the changes you make there will apply to all the doors in your drawing.  If you then want to do somethign that will only affect the exterior doors, you can select them one at a time using the shift key, and then hit "settings" once all are selected.

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