gnation,
I've been creating some trench drains of various lengths and building up a library. I had posted them to the CF user group, but I wouldn't reccomend downloading what i've posted as I've discovered that my over-detailing these has affected my drawings that i used them in... they looked great, but really slowed things down and even crashed my AutoCAD yesterday... so I've begun to redesign these as far more simplified versions (still more detailed than probably most should be... there's no reason that a trench actually needs to be depicted and removing the trench would make these even smaller Mvparts... but i'm going to attempt to use my new versions today and if they work out I'll repost them. -- the secret of course is to create one file that you use as your working drawing... keep the grate, trench, and 2 sides as seperate entities... in other words don't merge them together as a solid entity. If you make the drain itself part of the trench (like I did) you can move either side to create a distance from an end to the center of the drain. then you can use the solids editing, extrude face to extend the trench the same distance that you moved the sides and in this way acheive any length that you want. Of course you'll then need to duplicate the grate so that it fills the distance. -- mistakes I've made in my designs include 1. over detailing. 2. making my grate length 24 inches... that means that every trench I make has to be a multiple of 24 inches.. It would have been wiser to use a smaller increment or to perhaps have several smaller increments to choose from... it's not too late for me to change that... because my mvpart isn't a single solid element its always made up of the 4 parts described earlier. 3. I made the slots in the grate run the width in stead of the length. In the future I would do the reverse... it would reduce the number of surfaces and would really help to make the file size smaller. I hope this input helps... I still haven't tried to approach this parametrically... this project that I needed them for will be fine with what I've done so far. if you have any further questions feel free to email me at cad1@mclaughlin-mechanical.com (i didn't make up that address... it was here when they hired me)