Custom shape of stair stringer

One of my structural users specializing in industrial building type has sent me an email saying that he needs to model some exterior stairs with C-Channel stringers. However, he realizes that currently Revit Structure provides rectangular simple shape of stringer only (Figure 1).

(Figure 1)

Currently, Revit Structure doesn't have the ability to create custom shape of stringers. However, there are several workarounds to achieve that and the one that I would like to show you is an alternative use of Railing tool. Here are the steps:

- First, you need to turn off the Stair Stringer by setting the Right Stringer and Left Stringer parameter value to None (Figure 2).

(Figure 2)

- You can then turn on the visibility of Railing category that was turned off by default in Visibility/Graphics (Figure 3).

(Figure 3)

- You can now select the Railing geometry and go to the Properties in order to modify the Rail Structure type parameter. In the Edit Rails dialog box, you can assign your custom profile ex. C-Channel Profile and then adjust the Height and Offset so that it will be at same location as the stringers (Figure 4).

(Figure 4)

- In order to trim the bottom or top of the "fake" stringers, you can select and edit each Railing sketch by splitting the sketch line and assign the slope to "Flat" (Figure 5).

(Figure 5)

Comments

[JMelendez]

If I wanted to use a profile that is 1"x48" and I set the off set to 12", How do I get the bottom of the "Fake" stringer to be flat and the top of the "Fake" stringer to continue with its slope until it reaches the end of its boundry?? what happens, the top of the "fake" stringer also goes flat. I do not want that to happen. Any advice on what to do? the way your C-chanel shows is the way I want to show my plate rapped around.

[Jin]

cool! thanks for the tip

[Models]

You'd never guess how long it took them to generate these models.