What is a bay?
The official definition of a bay is “the space between frame center lines or primary supporting members in the longitudinal direction of the building.” In simpler terms, every time you connect two frames together, you make another bay. For example, the smallest building you can design with our online system is 30′ long. It would have two “end frames” and one “main frame” between them, 15′ from either of the end frames. Such a building is described as having two bays at 15 feet. Similarly, if you design a 100′ long building, you can choose to configure it with 4 bays at 25′ or 5 bays at 20′. In the first case, in addition to the two end frames, you would have 3 main frames spaced 25′ apart, and the second case, you would have 4 main frames spaced 20′ apart.
