Within the power pack railing macro there is a lengthen/shorten setting for the pickets. I have used this many times and have had success with it. It works perfectly for rails that are dead flat. The railings that our company makes for stairs and ramps are made of a 3/8x3 flat bar frame, with 1/2 sq stock pickets. This was tricky to figure out as everything defaults to pipe rail. Our pickets and flatbar always have square cut ends regardless if flat or sloped. For sloping rails, I used the cut into feature to achieve the square cut on the pickets and again used the lengthen/shorten feature to cut them square in the correct spot. The cut into feature works just like a wood workers mortise and tenon joint. I know that eventually the connection box will be deleted as I cannot get some rails to 100% complete with the macro. The cut features will be removed once the connection box has been deleted. The downfall to using the lengthen/shorten picket is when you have a sloped top bar meeting a flat top bar on stair rails. The pickets on the flat follow what was entered into the cut into feature, but manually modifying (5) pickets instead of (60) is a no-brainer decision. Please reach out if any of this is not understood, I have never been the best teacher. After 5 years of adance steel. I have finally made the time to figure out stairs and railings with the macro's.
We have been building railings from 2D cad drawings for way to long. Our fabricators could care less, as long as they are accurate and can be built. Using advance, however, will allow us to automatically generate lists and bills of materials and start accounting for the materials instead of doing it the caveman way. It becomes a linear footage game for us to purchase sticks of material. Between the 1/2 pickets and the 3/8x3 flatbar, we use an ungodly amount i'm sure.
