How to create Studding for Advance Steel Beams

We have all seen this request many times, for a very basic Advance Steel beam arrangement used for door lintels, wall supports or timber flitch type beams. This is several sections bolted together with a studding, either directly through the sections or by using spacer tubes.

We looked at this issue and decided to create a special bolt arrangement, which is a stud, with nuts and washers at both ends. This is then applied with the standard bolt placement tools, based upon the UCS direction. The spacings can be set within the bolt group, so you can have many along the beam at required centres.

This will then give easy labelling to the drawings, and more importantly filter through in the exploded bolts lists so you can see how many stud sections, nuts and washers are required.

This bolt arrangement can be configured from existing components in the management tool, bolt editor, or alternatively you can create new ones, with the stud is new bolt type added for this, and then the bolt set built around that and the components.

We look at how to use spacer tubes and again add in a standard tube section, using the standard cut at object macro from the features palette, which we can apply as a joint to both ends of the tube. With this in place the tube now alters length if the compound beam gap spacing is changed. These joints and tubes can be copied along the beam using the transform elements, and it also could be created as a custom connection and applied and copied along the beam.

With some additional elements in the bolt editor and some basic tools in advance, we can produce various compound/flitch/timber/channel arrangements.

Check out the video now for a more in-depth guide to the process: