Creating an adjustable cross brace.

[Anonymous]

I am trying to create a Cross Brace family  for our shoring frames.  Basically I need to creat an "X" made of L angles that pivots at the middle and can have adjutable lenghts. Is this something that is possible to do?

[Tom_Kunsman]

I am sure given enough time one could come up with a family that does what you want. I am anot sure if the Structural Framing Brace in Revit was ever meant to model two of something at a time. I sort of doubt that is the intent.

Defining the workplanes and gettign the "x" to flex correctly within the family could be done, but probably would require lots of trial and error and potentially some tricks as well.

Given all of that why not just model one leg of the "x" using the Brace option and then the other leg as a separate element?

Sure I guess if the height of the brace "x" changes you will have to manually change it as opposed to it automatically updating it.

You have to remember Revit was made by architects - the structual stuff came along later and does not work they way they probably should.

There might be a way using Dynamo to get wwhat you want done, but my Dynamo skills are way weaker than my Revit.

Given the amount of trial and error and testing to get a family to work I would be more temted to just model each leg of the "x" as a brace. Just my opinion though.

[Tom_Kunsman]

Of course why would you not just model a truss? The truss might give you what you are looking for. Just thought of the truss after my initial reply. You might have to define LOTS of trusses depending on WHAT you are doing, but it should work.

[Anonymous]

I actually got it to work finally by accident.  II created a box of references and created a sweep that went from corner to corner.   When I created the sweeps path i dropped the node at the end of the line on the intersection of the planes and it allowed me to lock it to that location.  Then when I changed the height or width it moved and changed the angle and length accordingly.