How would you approach creating mesh cage.

[Adrian.Mangan]

Hi All

So I am working on a stair project where the guardrail is wire mesh, originally I had the outer, inside, top and bottom panels (to make a cage) modeled in as twisted folded plate, but was unable to edit plate somehow to reflect Stainless Steel Mesh (1/8"), I could create new grating section but I chose to create Flat bar 1/8" x 96" to reflect a sheet and named it Mesh Stainless Steel, then created a new material for Stainless Steel Mesh and added density so that the weights might be at least close.

(I could have went back to plate and added that material but the flat will be easier put on drawings)

In short how would you approach this?

thank you for your time.

Model

https://autode.sk/2Vot7kk 

[markhubrich]

Doesn't the rail have pipe or anything? The model appears to show plate with hole pattern. 

I did a wire mesh rail a while ago in AS2019. It's here.. https://autode.sk/2y5WeQZ

[markhubrich]

Here's what the panels looked like.

[Adrian.Mangan]

Mark, I do not see your mesh in your list, did you create a mesh profile of just use 1/8" bar to create mesh. I have too much in the model to do this, would be far too many elements. If you turn off the mesh in my model you will see the posts inside. 

[markhubrich]

I made a piece of mesh larger than my largest part and grouped together. I turned off lists and numbering. Then I copied the mesh group from panel to panel and trimmed to the u channel. 

The main purpose I put the mesh in there was to show the wires aligning from panel to panel. Rails look like crap if the horizontal wires are not aligned vertically between panels. 

Now thinking back, I could have just copied one of the checkered plates from the gratings using the database exploring tools and used it as mesh. I wouldn't get what I wanted from alignment purposes but It would have filled my BOM nicely, and also for ordering purposes, nested using nc files. In my detail style I could have added a rule to not display the checker plate i copied as mesh. This way I can still show the wires alignment and my BOM would have the mesh listed. It just wouldn't show in the details, because I can't reference the wires, who cares. 

[Adrian.Mangan]

Yea I have done smaller ones before where I just drawn in the bars separately, this time the cage is curved so i originally had twisted curved plates but then changed to custom flat bar to represent curved plate and just used feature to cut top and bottom so it would give proper representation to fabricator cutting sheets. Just getting lists Im wondering if anyone has any better ideas.

Other project

https://autode.sk/2zLQP1O 

Sample list below.