Wall plate
load-bearing member in timber construction
A plate or wall plate is a horizontal, structural, load-bearing member in wooden building framing.
Timber framing
A plate in timber framing is "A piece of Timber upon which some considerable weight is framed...Hence Ground-Plate...Window-plate [obsolete]..." etc. Also called a wall plate, raising plate, or top plate, An exception to the use of the term plate for a large, load-bearing timber in a wall is the bressummer, a timber supporting a wall over a wall opening (see also: lintel). These are common in Australia.
The terms sole plate or sill plate are used for the members at the bottom of a wall at the foundation but are most often just called a sole or sill without the word plate. Other load-bearing timbers use the term plate but are not in the wall such as crown plate, a purlin-like beam carried by crown posts in roof framing, and a purlin plate which supports common rafters.
Platform framing
In platform framing there are three types of wall plates and are located at the top and bottom of a wall section, and the two hold the wall studs parallel and spaced at the correct interval. Each type continues in a piecewise fashion around the whole perimeter of the structure.
Sill plates — a lower wall plate which is bolted or strapped securely to the top of a foundation wall or concrete slab. These hold the house down against heavy winds.
“Wall plate” enters the record as load-bearing member in timber construction. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wall, plate and load-bearing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wall plate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.