There's a post (layman's term) in the middle of my attic that is cracking and bent. It wasn't like that the last time I checked maybe 2 months ago. This is in a 30 year-old house.
Now that I think of it… it may have showed minor signs of cracking 2 months ago but it wasn't noticeably bent. There was a little "feathering" of wood. Barely visible. Now it's looking much worse.
No, I don't see any sign of water damage and there haven't been any snows. Also no big storms lately. I live in Southern Florida.
My idea is to just put a steel plate with a bunch of nail holes in it to try and straighten things out. Or?
Best Answer
That vertical member is a truss chord not a post. It’s in compression (as @SteveSh) has identified.
It’s buckling due to an excessive vertical load (and probably because of a small defect in the wood).
This phenomenon is identified in Euler’s Formula. While I don’t understand the formula, the concept we know it by is the “slenderness ratio”. That is to say, a short board can support more load than a long board before it buckles, given the same size, material, etc. Likewise, the member will buckle in the narrow direction.
The center chords are the longest member in the trusses AND are in compression. This particular member has a small defect near the middle of the span (top to bottom). It also happens to be at the hip in the roof, so it’s probably carrying a slightly larger load than the adjacent trusses. (We often see defects in chords that cause them to fail.)
I’d repair the chord by sandwiching it between similar size members, much like what daneb described.