Advance Steel – Bolt Orientation

Advance Steel – Bolt Orientation

Everybody should be aware that in Advance Steel you can place bolts either way up. When placing bolts manually the head of the bolt is on the +Z side of the plane you are placing them on. If you want the bolts the other way round, with the head on the other side, you can tick the box “Inverted” in the Bolt Properties. Most Joints also have the option(s) to Invert the bolts.

But what difference does it make? Do the site installers look that closely at your GA drawing to see which way round you want the head of the bolt? In most cases probably not. So why should we care?

When doing clash checks, Advance Steel checks the lengths of the bolts to make sure there is space to actually insert a bolt into its location. If there are obstacle within the length of the bolt it will show a clash. Inverting the bolt might be one cure if there is more space on the other side of the material.

A more subtle difference is that bolts are counted as belonging to the assembly that the HEAD of the bolt sits on. This will affect the Bolt Erection Lists or any other list where bolts are listed according to assemblies. In turn this will also have an impact on lotting and phasing. Where members from one phase connect to a previous phase you want the bolts scheduled with the later phase.

Compare the image above, where the bolt head is on the left and the bolts are listed with assembly B1, against the image below, where the bolt head is on the right and the bolts are listed with B2.

Most of the time we don’t really mind which way round the bolts are in our model. However, it is good to be aware of these subtleties so that we can get the details right when they matter.

Written by Aleck Giles – Software Technical Specialist

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