Join Rebar

Join two or more aligned reinforcements end to end into a single continuous one, absorbing the gaps between them.

General Description

Join Rebar merges reinforcements that lie along one straight line into a single continuous reinforcement. It is the tool to reach for when a run of steel was modelled in pieces — a bar here, a lap there, a set at each end of a beam — and needs to become one bar.

The selections are ordered automatically along their common line, so the order you pick them in does not matter. Every gap between them is absorbed into the joined bar's length, and every internal joint disappears. Hooks are kept only at the two outermost ends of the run.

Bends survive the join. An L-shaped bar joined to a straight bar keeps its bend; only the collinear straight legs that meet at the joint are fused. What must be aligned is the ends being joined, not the whole bar.

The joined reinforcement takes its bar type, distribution, host, and parameters from a reference bar. When every selection already matches, the first one along the line is used automatically and you are never asked. When they differ — in bar type, bar count, or bar positions — the tool asks you to pick which reinforcement's properties to keep.

Key Features

Joins any number of reinforcements at once, not just two.
Orders the selections along their common line automatically, ignoring the order they were picked in.
Preserves bends; only the collinear ends that meet are merged.
Keeps hooks at the two outermost ends and removes every internal one.
Works on individual bars or on reinforcement sets.
Tolerates minor misalignment (0.5° and 5 mm) by snapping onto the reference's line.

Requirements

Works on shape-driven reinforcements only; free-form is not supported.
Reinforcements must be planar (not multiplanar) and distribute bars of a single, fixed length — varying-length distributions can't be joined.

Usage Procedure

Open Join Rebar from the Structure panel on the Frata ribbon tab.
Select two or more reinforcements whose ends lie along one straight line, then press Finish.
If the selections do not match one another, select the reinforcement whose bar type, distribution and parameters should be kept.
The selections are replaced by one continuous reinforcement.

Recommendations

Join individual bars to individual bars, or sets to sets. The two cannot be mixed.
Free-form, multiplanar, and varying-length reinforcements cannot be joined.
All selections must share a common plane. If they do not, the tool reports it and changes nothing.
Overlapping bars are fine — the overlap is absorbed like any gap. A bar lying entirely inside another is rejected, because its place in the sequence would be ambiguous.
The original reinforcements are deleted. Tags, dimensions, and anything else referencing them are lost, so add annotations after joining rather than before.
Joining is not reversible from within the tool; use Undo if you need to revert.

Frequently Asked Questions

I got the message "The reinforcements are not aligned: the ends to be joined must lie along one straight line." Why? The ends you're trying to join don't sit on a common line — the tool tolerates minor misalignment (0.5° and 5 mm), but beyond that it reports this instead of guessing your intent.

I got the message "The reinforcements do not share a common plane." Why? All selected reinforcements must lie in the same plane. Bends are fine as long as the ends being joined are collinear, but the overall selections must still share one plane.

I got the message "One reinforcement lies entirely within another, so their order along the line is ambiguous." What does that mean? One selected bar's full length sits inside another's — the tool can't determine which comes first in the joined sequence, so it stops rather than guessing.

I got the message "Join individual reinforcements to individual reinforcements, or sets to sets. The two cannot be mixed." Why? Your selection mixes single bars with reinforcement sets. Reselect so every item is either an individual bar or a set, not both.