Inserting fittings is a nice way
of adding members without breaking the route and without needing to fix
constraints and dimensions.
What I like to do when I have a quick layout to do or a proposal, for which we NEVER have enough time to make it proper, is to cheat and bend the rules as much possible and Tube and Pipe is no exception.
If you’ve finished the route and
you ready to place fittings, it’s easier not to drop them in the line, or
create nodes but to use the Insert Fitting command.
Once I’ve done my route and
proved that it’s a viable solution and that the installers will have enough
room to fit it I then turn to starting adding fittings. I am talking about
adding fittings like valves, pressure gages, sample points, etc. These are not
placed in automatically with the Populate Route command.
If the route is fully
constrained and populated it’s a royal pain to add more fittings. Dropping them
in your assembly will create new nodes in the route but this process will
delete constraints and dimensions and you need to do that extra work to get it
back to fully constrained. This is a fully constrained sketch route going crazy with
a single place fitting command.
 |
| Route going crazy with single fitting placed. |
This is
when Insert Fitting comes into place. Use the Place Fitting command to add your
parts but before you click to place it right-click in the graphical area and
choose Insert Fitting. This will allow you to insert it next to an already
existing fitting or between two existing fittings.
 |
| Insert Fitting on right click menu. |
If I
have a valve to place I find a close nearby elbow or any other populated
fitting and I drop it in there, and I keep inserting next to it the rest of the
fittings like pressure gages, sample points, etc. I am only interested to show
what else will be on that line and to get the BOM quantity and price as close
as possible.
If the
fitting to place is already available in the assembly then select it first and
use the Place Fitting command. If not, just start the command which will let
you browse for a part on disk. With the place fitting command active right
click on the graphical window and choose Insert Fitting. You can press Spacebar
to change connecting point on the fitting before finalizing the command. Move
your mouse pointer next to an existing fitting, and watch how the arrows are
displaying indicating your connection and when you are happy with the results
click to finalize the insert.
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| Insert Fitting doesn't break the route. |
TIP: Make sure that
the segment where you are inserting is long enough so that inserting the
fittings will not violate minimum length rule.
If you
deal with Butt Welded fittings you won’t need this but if you work with other
type of connection like the Socket Weld like I do then there are some
limitations. Once the fitting is inserted you need to right click it and choose
edit fitting connection. In the dialog you will have two connections, one to
the pipe and one to the existing fitting where you inserted yours. Edit the one
to the fitting and choose custom distance and enter 0. The fittings by default
will engage as per the authoring info which will overlap them.
The other issue is that the pipe
will be trimmed to the furthermost fitting last inserted and so you will lose
all those small segments in between them and if you need to do a cross section
in you drawing it will appear as they are butt welded and the missing pipe
segments will also give you less quantity in the BOM and Parts List. This is not a problem for me
since we don’t do cut-to-length lists or material lists and it’s only general
layouts for installers to follow.
And
this is it; nice and simple to speed up those designs. Would love to see what
tricks do you use to speed your work up.
Later,
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