Draw it in SketchUp.
Cut it the same day.
Railworks builds railings the way the shop builds them. Tube and flatbar, mitered at the corners, pickets tabbed into the rails. Then it writes a STEP file the tube laser can nest, so nobody has to rebuild the job in SolidWorks first.
SketchUp Pro 2024+ · Windows & Mac · Perpetual licence $99
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The part nobody else has
SketchUp has never exported STEP.
Not natively. The only other STEP plugin on the market imports; it has never exported. So the railing gets rebuilt in SolidWorks before the shop can touch it, and the detailer does the same job twice.
Railworks recovers the true arcs in the cross-section. That matters more than it sounds. A faceted tube matches no stock anyone sells, so the nester can’t place the cutline and somebody traces it by hand on every piece. Real cylinders, and it finds them itself.
a Railworks .stp opening in the nester,
cutline detected with no manual trace
What it looks like on a job
Draw the run
Pick a profile and build along a path. Members follow their centreline, so the run hangs off its line once and the section carries each corner.
Detail it like a fabricator
Tabs and slots, embedded pickets, baseplates, coped ends. The slots are real cut geometry. If they are wrong here, they are wrong on the machine.
Send it to the machine
Export STEP with true arcs in the section. One file per piece, quantities aggregated, and the nester finds the cutline on its own.
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PLACEHOLDER. Needs a real quote from a real shop, with a name on it. Every competing site runs one above the fold.
The suite
Every StepUP CAD tool carries the same exporters
STEP and NC1 in every product, so the path from model to shop floor is identical no matter which tool drew the steel.
Stop redrawing your own model.
Thirty days, fully functional, every exporter included. No card. If it doesn’t save you a job’s worth of time, you haven’t lost anything.
SketchUp Pro 2024+ · Windows & Mac