Custom Elbow, Self Draining Lines P1

Self draining lines?

I’ve used those quite a lot on this past year and it seems we will continue in the ones to come.

I have been contacted by one of you (my internet friends) and asked if I think it’s possible to create custom length elbows and use it with Tube and Pipe.

                Apparently his company has open a support case with Autodesk and after a thorough investigation they were told it’s not possible and to continue constraining the fittings, one after the other just as they do now.

                So he has resorted to the dark side and contacted a bogus blogger to see if he has a possible solution. Happy to say I do have a possible solution but it’s up to him to decide if he wants to go the TP way.

                The biggest challenge is to create an elbow with custom angle and where the user is prompted to specify a length for the entry, exit legs (straight section of the elbow).

                Most important phase in the design process is to get the user requirements right and I have failed that from the beginning but I’ll blame the language barrier and the different time zones.

                All the companies I know buy 90deg elbows and they bend them to required angle because it’s cheaper this way. My initial impression was that they use 90deg elbows as well but they cut the legs at an angle (slope angle) rather than bending the elbow.

                Some good info emerged out of this and that’s why I decided to mention it. So keep it in the back of your mind in case you ever need to do something similar.

                There are a couple of methods to cut the legs back but some will give you errors down the line.

                Do not control the leg lengths by editing the sweep path because when removing the leg altogether (max cut) you will get errors on generating other members with 0 length legs.

                Do not author the part by using the leg face because that will fail. I will fail when you cut the face to an angle (the face is not circular anymore) and it will fail if you remove the straight leg completely, (face not existing anymore).

                Instead create sketch points and work points for your authoring connection setup.

Authoring work features

                While the elbow is 90deg the connection needs to be picked up as different angle, that is a must for self draining lines or you will not be able to select the fitting in the TP Style Setup dialog window.

Authoring angle

TP style dialog

                For that you need to create custom work axes but that’s easy if you create some construction lines in the sweep sketch. Check out my blog on authoring empty parts here.

                Because I wanted the users to have a minimum, maximum allowable distance and a 1mm increment (keep it nice and tidy) I have setup custom cells for my ipart table and that was a big waste of time.

                Do not create custom range cells or columns in the ipart table; they have no effect once published to content center. Instead publish it as it stands and alter the content center family table.

don't waste time here

                Now that we got that out of the way I will show you what my friend really wanted and how to create a proper custom length elbow to be used for tube and pipe self draining lines but that in the next blog.

                PS: I am doing a video for this as well…… more than a year since I’ve done a video !!!!

Here is the test elbow (the wrong one) in case you are looking for inspiration or just want to test it out.

Later,
ADS

               

photo credit: Hernan Piñera Seated (license)

3D Panoramic Renderings

Forget about everything you learned on my blog, forget about all the nice little tricks, the TP videos, and any ilogic code given here.

Phone Glasses

If you will take just one thing out of this blog is to get yourself a pair of virtual glasses, they can be the cheapest you can find, like the google cardboard, and do a 3D panoramic rendering of your cad plant room.

Have I mentioned that I have been working on this Glue360 high purity water treatment plant for a pharmaceutical company? That is a whole series of blogs on it’s own but essentially it’s like NavisWorks in the cloud. Each uploads it’s own model (electrical, mechanical, structural, etc.) and you can see it on the web on any device anywhere in the world.

So I grabbed myself a copy of the model and did a high quality 3D panoramic rendering. We have been blown away, and never thought it would be such a cost effective, pure marketing power, highly accessible solution.

I can’t share that with you because of contractual clauses but I will share a 3D picture which I took by installing Google Cardboard Camera from the Google Cardboard set of apps in android market.

This is my new way of taking pictures, and this one taken on RHS Wisley (Royal Horticultural Society) includes sound as well and you are immediately transposed in the scenery. Wisley is one of the best gardens I have visited and in the summer we go there almost every weekend. It’s close, convenient and perfect place for my son to burn out energy (hyperactive one).

GET A PAIR OF glasses and try it out. Head over to Renderings360 and try some shared by the users..

If you're into plant's, factories, building design then you will like this one; although it doesn't even come close to what my plant looks like. You can see that the models are simplified, like those from Plant 3D and that's another reason I like Inventor, the quality is incomparable.

It is such a powerful tool that I told all our engineers never to take photos from now on but take 3D photos of our plants. We sometimes need to do as built model updates and this is so much better.

They could buy a box on their way to client’s site meeting; I will send them a link to the 3D rendering which opens on the phone's web browser and they can have a really powerful tool for their presentation.

Marketing was all over me and in 2 days they bought couple of glasses and off they went for Lab Innovations exhibit in Birmingham.

Enough said, … go get them

Here is the Wisley image.

Later,

ADS

No news?

No news good news, right? Not in my case.

I haven’t diapered on some exotic island drinking coconut cocktails, in fact it was quite the opposite. I felt tired this year, more than usual and was wondering why that is and so I started looking for reasons.

While there could be others as well I stop looking when I found out that by the end of October we had almost 200% live contracts against last year. Cramming 2 years of work into a single one can be exhausting and to be honest I am not looking forward to next year if the trend maintains.

Furthermore (can’t help it) I stop and answer to all your emails, youtube and blog comments, inventor forum, personal messages as well as helping old colleagues.

Two week was special because we had Inventor Open Days, and I couldn’t miss that. What is that you ask? It’s when autodesk employees take a day off answering questions on the forum, but anyone can answer really. Thursday night I spent an extra couple of hours answering questions and trying to help them because on rare occasions like this you can get some really interesting questions and learn a lot.

In fact I saved a couple of posts that I really liked and intend to share them on the blog. Not stealing other people’s work but rather sharing them with those of you that don’t have time to read them all and would better subscribe to blogs like mine and get it as a concentrated pill.

As if this wasn’t enough I decided to get some virtual reality glasses, not the ultra expensive giga-bucks to ruin the economy kind but the cheap phone version. This is essentially just a plastic box where you stick your phone and you watch 3D stuff. Things like panoramic pictures, videos and the “piece de resistance” high quality CAD renderings.

Will have to expand on that on the next blog.

Later,

ADS

photo credit: Anders V "Read All About It" (license)

Drawing layers

                Do you use layers in Inventor drawings? Or do you consider them legacy, obsolete, pre cretaceous kind of animal?

Add caption

Last week we looked at showing hidden lines for buried components and now we look at a different method for doing that but with the additional benefits.

                When detailing pipe routes you can use the “Include Route Centerlines” command but if that view is a detail, section, cropped view you end up with a lot of extra lines. You can use this method to clean them up as well.

Include Route Centerlines, adds more than visible.

               

                Another good example is the worm gear bellow. I have an M10 hole on center and I can’t really show it properly. Top left to bottom right I have hidden lines view, normal view, hidden break out view, normal breakout view and yet not of them looks good enough.

Top left - Hidden Lines, Top Right - Normal,
Bottom Left - Hidden Break Out, Bottom Right - Normal Break Out

                What I tend to do is turn the hidden lines on for that view then edit the layers, where I turn off every one of them except Hidden and Hidden Narrow and save the style. Now I only have left the hidden lines which makes it so much easier to delete the extra stuff.

               

Turn layers off to help your selection.

                TIP: On the edit layers dialog window you can SHIFT select them all and when you click the light bulb the visibility changes to all at once.

                TIP: It’s much easier to do a window selection and select all and then hold down CTRL and deselect the view, and other curves that you need keeping. You can then use the Visibility on the right click menu to turn them off at once.

                And there you have it. Hope you’ll put this to good use and give layers a chance ; they are not used just for AutoCAD exports only.

Later

ADS

                

photo credit: Eugen Naiman layers (license)

Drawing Hidden Lines

In the drawing have you ever needed to show components buried down below?

I didn’t have a lot of time this week for blogging but I forced myself to wake up early today and write a couple of words on this trick I use quite a lot. Will try and keep it simple for now and will do a follow-up next week on layers and how to leverage them to your advantage.

                A lot of the times I find myself in need to indicate components that are not visible unless you change the view to hidden lines. That can be daunting for untrained eye to look at and it will clutter the drawing so I tend to avoid it if I can.

               

For example take a look at the vessel in the image bellow. Turning the view to hidden lines would have made a mess out of it with no way to identify what’s what. Showing just the legs in hidden lines makes a huge difference.

Hidden lines accentuate design.

To show a component you need to find it in the browser, right click, and choose "Hidden Lines".

Enabling hidden lines

As soon as you set hidden lines on you get a message saying "Dependent vies styles will become independent”.

Changing the view message

Sometimes the “Hidden Lines” menu will be grayed out and that is because your view has linked design view representation. For that you need to edit your view and tick the “Associative” box off as bellow.

Associative off on view properties

A new option is needed here besides “show hidden lines” and that should be simply “show” which will turn the model visible (in dotted lines because it is underneath in the background) without its internal geometry. I need to indicate the component in outline, not the whole geometry but that’s for a latter post.

Next new feature?

   

Take a look at the drawing below. The drain header is visible and I only need the outline body; normally we show all runs in hidden lines but this is just a sales proposal and I couldn't be bothered. This shows just enough info, eliminating clutter and accentuating design.

Way better, isn't it?

Later,

ADS

photo credit: Max Garçia Metallica (license)

T&P Hoses P2 - Documenting Hose Lengths

How do I show hose lengths? How to document hoses? I need to document cut lengths, swage distance as well as overall lengths, so how to do that?

               

                Last week we covered BOM structure for hoses and I’ve showed you how to mark them as single items in BOM / Parts List. This is useful if you don’t’ manufacture the hose and you don’t need to show all the sub-parts individually.

                But what if you need to show those dimensions and send the drawing over to whoever is going to manufacture it; assuming it’s not a standard stock item.

                Hoses are created as a subassembly in tube and pipe and you get the route, the sweep part and the connectors (depending on style settings) in one single assembly.

Hoses are created as assemblies

                Unfortunately the info is not at the assembly level and it can’t be exposed when changing BOM structure to “Purchased” or “Inseparable” (check my previous post here). All the info is created in the hose part (the one containing the sweep).

                If you open the hose and check the parameters window you can find a couple of parameters defining the various lengths for the hose (they are exposed as custom iproperties as well.)

                If you open the parameters window here’s what you will find:

PL - Pipe Length (hose in this case)

RPL - I believe this is "Rounded Pipe Length" (hose in this case)

OPL - I believe this is "Overall Pipe Length" (hose in this case)

ROPL - I believe this is "Rounded Overall Pipe Length" (hose in this case)

Parameters exposed to iProperties.

If you have connectors each end (like I do) you will notice that the sweep sketch is made from a spline and 2 straight lines (swage distance). Measuring the spline and the individual lengths you will get PL(hose length) which is then rounded to the nearest increment (changeable from the T&P route style) and you then get RPL (rounded hose length).

Rounded increment is declared in the Route Style

OPL (overall hose length) you get by adding the connector lengths to the PL (hose length) and just like above when you round this to the nearest increment you get ROPL (rounded overall hose length).

                If you need this info in the Parts List you need to add these custom iproperties manually by editing the drawing table. However if you marked the hose as “Inseparable” or “Purchased” the info will not show up.

                In both cases you can add a Leader Line and use the “Custom Properties – Model” to show these on the drawing.

Use Leader Lines to document the various lengths

                Here's a short animation of the process.

Later,

ADS photo credit: Garden hose (license)

T&P Hoses P1 - BOM Structure

Do you include hoses and flexible tubing to your design? Are you thinking into taking your products to next level by adding this info to your design?

While we use them in our plant layouts we don’t really document them on the drawing but nonetheless there are some good practices as well as tips and tricks.

Will keep this simple and split it into separate blogs and for now the question is:

How can I show a hose assembly as single part?

We are not hose manufacturers so it would help to see the assembly in the Parts Only section of the BOM along with all the fittings, valves, conduits, all parts really to be purchased.

This needs editing the BOM and changing the “BOM Structure” field to one of these 2 options:

- Mark it as “Purchased”

-Mark it as “Inseparable”

For all my life I have been thinking about “Inseparable” items as welded, casted, glued, press fitted, riveted kind of items but it’s really just a way of grouping several parts in BOM.

“Purchased” it’s what I’ve been using and it’s a nice way of merging multiple parts as a single item. Think of skids, tanks, etc. or any assembly which you vendor has sent over and you consider that a single purchase / single item.

The advantages of keeping it or importing it as assembly rather than single part is you can play with Level Of Detail (LOD), Design View Representations or show different positional representations.

 In the Structured tab you can still expand and collapse it (if show all levels is active), edit the iproperties but now it shows up in the Parts Only section of the B.O.M.

At this point should mention that if you want to show the child components of the hose assembly you will change the BOM Structure to “Phantom”. This will promote the children and hide the subassembly; I use this all the time to group things together for less constraints, improved pattern, etc.

Changing Bom Structure type.

Later,
ADS


photo credit: Steel-braided hose (license)