Frame generator - end treatments for welded tube steel connections

[Anonymous]

I'm making a frame out of tube steel that is all welded together. My intent is to do a stress test on this model to do some load ratings.

The issue I have is that, due to the radius of the rube steel edges, I don't have contact all around each of the connections. This gives me bad stress simulation results. The available end treatments (notch or extend) don't give me the option of extending a tube steel to contact the flat and curved faces of the intersecting tube. 

"Trim/Extend" will only let me pick one flat surface, not a group of surfaces (in the case of a tube, three surfaces being curved-flat-curved). I could extend beyond the curved section and then "notch" it, but then the issue is that I'd have islands of parts left inside the intersecting tube that I don't want.

This means I currently have to do one of two things, and neither option is easy:

1. Convert the frame to a weldment and physically model the welds at every connection. This is time consuming and also creates more parts that need meshed in the simulation, which is even more time consuming.

2. Edit each member and manually extrude the profile of the shape to the intersecting member. This is time consuming as well, and when you double-click to edit a member of a frame, it ignores any existing end treatments when it goes into the editing mode.

This image shows the type of connection I'm referring to. Note that the left connection has a weld added to fill the void while the right connection still has a gap where the tubes won't touch on the top and bottom edges.

My proposal would be to either modify the "Trim/Extend" command to allow a group of surfaces as the "trim to" surfaces OR to introduce a new command "Extend and notch" that would extend a member as far as it can go to make full contact with the next member.