ROD for hanging unistruct from ceiling

[kameron1967]

Hi, 

I was wondering if anyone has a threaded rod (or non threaded) family to hanging unistruts from the ceiling or provide insight on how to build its family.  Thank you in advance.

[L.Maas]

There is no fixed way to construct such a family. It will depend on your workflow and how your projects are organized.

You can make them free 'standing', ceiling based, floor based, face based etc.

Depending on what you have in the project, how you want them 'fixed', what you have to control over (e.g. floors, walls, ceilings, roofs) and what you would like to happen if things changes in the project different approaches might be better.

As soon as above is the case you might consider to start with a generic model template and create your unistrut with different parameters.

This generic model you then can nest in a hosting family which is for example ceiling based. You then pass the parameters from the nested family to the hosted family.

In this way it is easy to adapt you unistrut family to different situations (ceuiling based, facebaed etc).

[chrisplyler]

I suspect...

1. You really don't want it to be modeled with threads.

2. You'll want a type parameter for nominal diameter.

3. You'll want an instance paramter for length.

Other than that, I think this is pretty wide open with optional methods. Make it as a column? Make some unistrut as a beam? The possibilites get interesting.

[kameron1967]

No, no threads necessary as that will require too much memory.

[kameron1967]

I've never nested a family inside a family before. In the generic model, is there one that's line based? Yes, having the option to adapt to base change would be good. Could you list the steps for me to follow? I'm fairly new at family creation. Thank you.

[chrisplyler]

I couldn't tell you the steps. I would have to experiment my way through it, same as you. Maybe somebody else, with more family experience, will chime in.

If you're willing to do it as a colum, just take a round column family, save it as allthread.rfa, create types that are 1/4"dia, 3/8"dia, 1/2"dia, and delete all the other types. Just give it a try and see if it suits your needs or not.

If you're going to also try the unistrut as a beam, then I would make the allthread starting the steel pipe structural column family.

Seems like you would be able to make two "column" allthreads with a base at whatever level, then put a "beam" bit of unistrut between them on that level with some end extensions. Ought to look decent, right?

Same for the unistrut beam. Try starting with one of the structural steel beam families and just changing it's shape to something resembling strut.

[Keith_Wilkinson]

Does it need to be a structural element or just a family?