Issues with Decks

[Tony_D96]

Anyone else find that drawing decks in Chief is like pulling teeth? I seem to get the outline drawn in alright, but it's in the framing and creating accurate cross sections where I run into trouble. I can say as a carpenter that Chief has no idea how you're supposed to frame a deck, and it's difficult and time consuming to fix it manually. I've even tried editing the defaults and I still find it making up it's own mind when I generate framing. For example, it seems to randomly pick a joist direction when it auto generates, and drawing a bearing line and rebuilding just gives me loads of error messages. Anyway, just curious if anyone else feels my pain here, and I thought we could share general tips to help each other out. 

 

On a side note I think they should expand on deck drawing tools in future updates. When compared to drawing out walls, deck drawing tools are very limited!

[justmejerry]

If you set your joist direction instead of automatic it will generate the joist direction whichever way you want. all in the dbx for the room if you made it a deck room.

[Tony_D96]

I wound up finding out that what's giving me issues is the fact that my deck is attached to the "second floor" as it's drawn (the house is built on a sloped lot). In order for the bearing lines tool to work properly you need to jump down a floor and then draw it. Good tip for future reference though.