On Nov 4, 10:05*am, Swingman wrote:
On 11/4/2010 7:22 AM, Larry Jaques wrote:

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 20:32:52 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

On Nov 3, 6:33 pm, Larry Jaques

Hurricane-proof house? I don't see as -any- ties or shear walls. *I
thought I'd see tons for that dangerous kind of area. *Your tubasixes
are casually toenailed to the sill. *Scary. *Tie that puppy down, boy!

The sheetrock will hold everything together!

OH, I forgot the wet Chinese sheetrock. *Pardon me.

Texas must not follow international code.

It does ... but you have to be informed before you flap your trap.

You guys can laugh, but drywall can actually be an element in a properly
designed shearwall (albeit a weak one, but it does have shear resistance
which adds to the total effect), particularly in a hurricane prone area,
but not so much in earthquake zones.

I wouldn't trust the stuff (though I live in an old house, and so
therefore consequently do) for a shear wall. I think it's
particularly bad for cyclic loading, like you said, in seismic zones.
Gypsum shear walls for residential construction have largely gone the
way of the dodo with the "new and improved" building code. Using
gypsum for the shear wall would cause a typical plan examiner to
immediately break out the red stamp unless there were specific
structural notation/calculation from an engineer.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...l.491/abstract
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf1985/patto85a.pdf

R