STAIR RAILINGS ARE SO DIFFICULT!

[watson.145302]

I have a 10 story building and I'm working my way up through trying to get my railings to meet correctly at the landing and it's very hard. It requires tiny little railings and i feel like I'm making a mess. Does anyone have good solid advice for constructing fire stair railing?

[Scott Womack]

I'm not sure this is "solid" advice, you can keep each railing as one for each u-shaped portion of stair. You can always "split" the railing line while in edit mode, and tell the system which pieces are flat. It's still a pain, but does work better. We gave up trying to get exact railings from our model, and will use some 2D components in the CD Section view.;)

[dhurtubise]

Have you tried adding a custom baluster at the end of the railing ?

[watson.145302]

I'm not sure what you mean by a custom balluster. I've added pieces of the railing that are seperate from the stair railing just so it will connect but it's the same railing type. I just find the constructability of railings to be very challenging...my team is getting frustrated w/ these stairs taking so much time.

[sjsl]

Don't forget, if all of your floor levels are the same ht. you can select the stair Properties and check the "Multistory" feature.

[watson.145302]

we do have some multistory stairs and some that only run one flight because of different floor to floor heights...I generally get the idea with the railings...it's in the unusual instances that I get tripped up on.

[dysart]

Stairs are tough to work with.

Generally I will utilize the "Multistory Top Level" Constraint option for all mid level equal floor to floor height stairs. I then create my top and bottom versions as needed.

For custom stringers, I use a "rail" set at an appropriate height.

One tip is that for multistory rails, keep the sketch for the rails slightly appart at their joining, 1 inch should do it. Otherwise, they won't stack...

Anyway it's certainly not easy and I know there are many wishlists out there hoping for a better ways.

Attached is an example.

[dfriesen]

Attached is an example.
Thank you for posting that - I think I've got much to learn from this example.
How do you deal with that 1" gap? Just throw in some masking regions and be done with it?

[dysart]

How do you deal with that 1" gap?

I just leave it, although that's less than ideal. I just tried to join my sketch lines and found that the upper rails actually behaved with a warning, but when I tried to line up my stringers (actually they are rails) I get undesired results. See attached pfd. Try it your self...