I am adding knee braces to my frame which is located at a ramp. For some reason my knee braces are attaching to my level and not my beam. The location of my beam is at a different elevation from my ramp level (I had to adjust column heights to create my ramp).
Do you know why my knee braces are attaching to my level and not my beam? Is there a way to correctly attach my knee braces?
One thing you could try is resetting the column elevations, next put in the braces, then adjust the column elevations back to the desired height.
My other idea is that the program is getting confused by the adjacent bay. My approach would be to set those beams back to gravity, and try again with the problem bay, then reset the adjacent bay beams back to lateral if it works.
I don't think "add special" will help here unless the bottom of the knee braces are at the story datums.
Seth, I tried both suggestions and it didnt work. The first option I am able to frame knee braces to beam and columns at the correct elevation (one at the time), but when I change my ramp level elevation and adjust column elevations (to the correct height) my knee brace connected to the column stays connected at the same point which makes my knee brace to stretch.
The second option just didnt work for me. Do you have any other tricks under your sleeve that might help me add these knee braces to my ramp?
I f you send the file I can take a look.
Otherwise if the stretch method partial works maybe you could place the knee braces initially with the wrong vertical offset then stretch it to be right.
Seth, I just sent you, my file. Let me know what you can do. Thank you!
Seth, I also tried starting my knee brace with a calculated wrong location so when I later input my correct column height my knee brace goes back to the correct location. For this approach I had to subtract my vertical height elevation from each beam (at each location) to my vertical knee brace height. This approach was working fine until I had negative numbers which the system will not allow me to input them on the "Steel Brace - Standard Profile."
Without the full model it's hard for me to advise you, but perhaps there is a way to define the story data so that the beams don't have to be raised an lowered as often. Are you sloping the framing, and if so is the sloping essential to get an accurate analytical model?