CAD Questions Thread?

[Addicted]

I made my own. took me about a week to source all parts /design and build. works a treat!



thinking of converting it to a 3D printer now, need to get a 4th axis sorted!

Keep it and build a 3d printer, I can link a decent kit for about £350-£400 if needed

p.s. can you do carbon fiber cutting?

 

[Rob]

Many thanks I'll give that a go, there any many Web sites detailing many calculations but none seemed to be the right format for cad.

What on earth are you talking about old chap?

To start with, to find the scale option, you shouldn't be 'inside' the viewport, you should just have it selected. Then there should be some standard settings, 1:100. Etc, and to do any custom, you just divide the number.

So to get 1:5 = 1/5 = 0.2 (that's what you put in the box)

 

[Andy_con]

yes it took me about 2 weeks to work out that you need to select the actual viewport not click inside the viewport.

but 0.2 isn't 1:500
I have been using the standard ones but I also need 1:500, I think 0.002 is 1:500

 

[Panda.]

@andy_con - not sure it this is of any help to you - I really struggle with scaling/working out the fractions to percentages and don't use CAD often enough to always remember them!


I do have a question mind, trying to get a SHAPE file (topography data for a my MA site) into CAD, the method i found doesn't seem to work. Is there any way I can do it without having to spend half the day watching ArcGIS load and then export the file...?

 

[SharkyUK]

Shape files... f**king ancient and nasty things. I hate them. Good luck mate!

 

[Andy_con]

thanks for the tables, they are ace.

sorry cant help with your question

 

[Panda.]

Yeah sacked off trying to faff about with SHAPE files. What an archaic piece of software GIS is...

I've managed to get myself in a state - I've a drawing in meters, insertion is meters. trying to scale it 1:100/1:2000 and its having a mare. The paper is set to '1mm = 1 unit'. I cannot see what I've missed to make it scale right?! Even when '1mm = 1000 units' in page setup its still not scaling right. At work we had pages set up read that you imported so I've not had to set up scales myself for ages. I suspect its something minor and stupidly obvious. :weary:.. @Rob .... anyone?

 

[Rob]

Yeah sacked off trying to faff about with SHAPE files. What an archaic piece of software GIS is...

I've managed to get myself in a state - I've a drawing in meters, insertion is meters. trying to scale it 1:100/1:2000 and its having a mare. The paper is set to '1mm = 1 unit'. I cannot see what I've missed to make it scale right?! Even when '1mm = 1000 units' in page setup its still not scaling right. At work we had pages set up read that you imported so I've not had to set up scales myself for ages. I suspect its something minor and stupidly obvious. :weary:.. @Rob .... anyone?

Hmmm, so if you're drawing in meters, (f**k knows why) but 1 unit is 1mm, then it should be solved by saying 1 unit = 1000mm.

Having just re-read its not paper settings you want to change, it's the whole drawing properties.

Then just set your scale correctly in the paper.

If you want to email me it with an explanation I should be able to fix it?

 

[Andy_con]

can anyone help, cad and maths skills needed

ill give some info so it all makes sense -

I want to put this in my cnc machine

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3KW-AIR-C...194?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3a883f0f2a

but its speed is 18000rpm, which causes me all sorts of bearing and tooling issues (its hard to get tools balanced to 18000rpm)
so the plan would be to use a pulley to do 2:1 ratio and take the speed down to 9000rpm, but im not sure I will be able to get a 2:1 pulley due to sizes involved.

the end of the new motor is an ER20 which means it can take a 20mm cutter, so end is likely to be a min of 25mm. I need to find exact size as I know its important.

this is the pulley I cant change - 18 teeth and Pitch: 0.375"/9.525mm
http://www.bearingshopuk.co.uk/18-l-100-tl-timing-pulley/#product_tabs_description_tabbed

fig 19d -

http://www.sdp-si.com/D265/HTML/D265T015.html

is anyone clever enough to work out whats the smallest possible and draw it up in CAD, i know im not.
then I could look to get one made

 

[Meek_racing]

Any tips on what home made or purchased workstations are available to run SolidWorks for around £500-£600 all in? Medium sized builds, no FEA or simulation required. I'm out of touch with computer specs these days and the ones we run in the office are £2,000 + so It's hard to judge what will do or where I should spend more in one area and less in the other. I've looked at a few refurbished Dell Precisions on ebay but I'm always a bit iffy about second hand electrical goods on there...

 

[Gray]

Any tips on what home made or purchased workstations are available to run SolidWorks for around £500-£600 all in? Medium sized builds, no FEA or simulation required. I'm out of touch with computer specs these days and the ones we run in the office are £2,000 + so It's hard to judge what will do or where I should spend more in one area and less in the other. I've looked at a few refurbished Dell Precisions on ebay but I'm always a bit iffy about second hand electrical goods on there...

We deploy HP Z420 workstations to our CAD guys at work, but they cost £1600 with the below spec:

Intel i7

32Gb RAM

250Gb SSD

Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics card

You would be able to lower the spec to make the price cheaper (obviously!)

But they are very capable workstations and it's rare we have problems with them.

 

[Meek_racing]

£1600 is too much, it will literally be for normal PC use and then some CAD stuff out of hours. Was hoping someone would have a spec of something they built similar.

 

[Steven103]

I hope to be brief, because you could go on forever. To tailor a computer to CAD you'd want more cores rather than chasing outright processor speed & to be spending a much higher proportion of the budget on memory/HDD than GFX card compared to a gaming machine.

A typical "good all round" £500 machine (i5, 8GB of RAM, entry level gaming graphics card) will run Solidworks so adequately that you won't see a need for more unless you regularly delve into complex models (stab in the dark, 50+ items in the feature tree? At which point I'd hazard a guess that you're not building your models in an efficient manor!) or large/complex assemblies. The budget will get very tight if it needs to include a monitor, keyboard/mouse/speakers, operating system etc

To all extents and purposes anything will run FEA & CFD as well, it's just whether it takes 1-2 hours or 6 to do a simple but good quality simulation of a manifold or front wing.

I believe single licenses start from around £3000 as well. IIRC from 2014 onwards Solidworks doesn't support Win XP or 32bit OS.

 

[Meek_racing]

License will be borrowed from my works one - feature tree and assemblies are not an issue, I'm experienced enough to deal with that one The stuff I will do at home will be non work related anyway so very minimal compared to what I do at work.
Yup, I'd expect an operating system in with the price. Basically something that will work and then I can sort out a monitor at a later stage, my tv monitor will do for now.

 

[Gus]

@Meek_racing Let me know if you need a cheap workstation for this - I dont know the exact spec but have some high end Dell workstations with Xeon processors that would be perfect for CAD work, like @Steven103 says they have something silly like 16 cores.

 

[Steven103]

What are you typing your forum posts on?

Small stuff at home is very manageable these days on a surprisingly modest spec. Might be a case of finding some (old) compatible RAM on ebay, chucking it in & away you go.

 

[Andy_con]

anyone fancy lending me a hand?

im looking to upgrade the auto tool changer on my cnc machine from a 6 station to an 8 station.

this is how the tool changer looks

you cant see it very well as its a rubbish photo, but at the back just behind the green casing is a motor, this turns a cog which in turn turns another cog which is connect to the aluminium disk which holds all the tools.

current two cogs

I need two new cogs cad'ed up in 2d so I can machine them for the new setup. trouble is ive not done cogs in cad and don't know where to start.

if anyone wants to lend a hand, two cogs, one twice as big as the other.
cog centres are 47mm apart
as small as possible teeth for better accuracy

any takers?

 

[Rob]

If I knew anything about cogs I could do it in minutes, but I don't, so there's so many unknowns on there for me I couldn't tell you how accurate I might be.

 

[Rob]

anyone fancy lending me a hand?

im looking to upgrade the auto tool changer on my cnc machine from a 6 station to an 8 station.

this is how the tool changer looks

you cant see it very well as its a rubbish photo, but at the back just behind the green casing is a motor, this turns a cog which in turn turns another cog which is connect to the aluminium disk which holds all the tools.

current two cogs

I need two new cogs cad'ed up in 2d so I can machine them for the new setup. trouble is ive not done cogs in cad and don't know where to start.

if anyone wants to lend a hand, two cogs, one twice as big as the other.
cog centres are 47mm apart
as small as possible teeth for better accuracy

any takers? :smile: :smile:

Just to help out a little, that should be simple use of the array tool, but getting those circular end sections right would be a b**ch, because you don't know what size the circle originally is, nor what fraction of it is being sliced off. i.e if that's 20% of a 20mm circle, or 10% of a 30mm circle. If that makes any sense.

 

[Andy_con]

sorry if I was unclear, I want two new cogs. I don't want to use any of the old cogs

 

[Andy_con]

Just to help out a little, that should be simple use of the array tool, but getting those circular end sections right would be a b**ch, because you don't know what size the circle originally is, nor what fraction of it is being sliced off. i.e if that's 20% of a 20mm circle, or 10% of a 30mm circle. If that makes any sense.

sorry if I was unclear, I want two new cogs. I don't want to use any of the old cogs

 

[Rob]

sorry if I was unclear, I want two new cogs. I don't want to use any of the old cogs

But as I said, is it not massively size critical?? So will it not have to be an exact replica of what you have?

Oh sorry, I've just cottoned on. Could you not use two traditional cogs then? If you want accuracy, i.e 3.4 rotations = change tool, then a more traiditional cog setup would be far better than what you have, because that's a "snapping reliant" cog isn't it?

 

[Rob]

sorry if I was unclear, I want two new cogs. I don't want to use any of the old cogs

i.e something like this:

 

[Andy_con]

i.e something like this:

thats jsut what im talking about ;-)

like i say i wont be using either of the two existing cogs, they are not right for the new setup.

the new setup will be driven by a stepper motor, so positioning of the tool under the spindle isnt an issue. i just need two cogs to fill a distance is 47mm

 

[Andy_con]

But as I said, is it not massively size critical?? So will it not have to be an exact replica of what you have?

Oh sorry, I've just cottoned on. Could you not use two traditional cogs then? If you want accuracy, i.e 3.4 rotations = change tool, then a more traiditional cog setup would be far better than what you have, because that's a "snapping reliant" cog isn't it?

finished cad'ing everything up, subject to the cogs.

so I just need a way to driving the tool disk by the stepper motor

 

[Andy_con]

Questions -

normally when I click on the square icon to draw a square, you click your start point then just type in the dimensions. but CAD is doing weird s**t, I click square and its asking for area, dimension, rotation. so I have to type dim, then it asks for an XYZ separately.

what have I clicked on by mistake to make it do this?

 

[Panda.]

question....

We're ahving a mare with CAD at work. I've a drawing, set up to our CTB plot style etc. everyhting appears as it should until you export it to PDF (Plot -> dwg-PDF). once open in adobe its at about 60% brightness? leaders are grey rather than black, our logo etc is washed ou tlooking. nowhere can we find any setting that would affect the drawing, there're no layer transparencies set etc either... any ideas..... @Rob perhaps? spent about 3 hrs trying to get the bl00dy thing to pdf right.. taa

 

[Knuckles]

I found this yesterday, it's a free 3d modelling app, and after you get your head around it, it's brilliant for knocking up quick models to see how things will fit, before spending time modelling them up properly in a proper programme.

http://www.123dapp.com/design

 

[Andy_con]

ive just downloaded autocad 2016, so ive gone from 2006 to 2016.

OMG I cant use the thing, so bloody different. im struggling to do the most simplest of things

 

[Matt e]

is anyone able to draw a plaque like this?
@Knuckles
@Rob

 

[Knuckles]

is anyone able to draw a plaque like this?
@Knuckles
@Rob

I can't do text (easily) sorry.

Iirc @TonkaTruck was making similar plaques to this

 

[Rob]

is anyone able to draw a plaque like this?
@Knuckles
@Rob

Aye, can do.

What for?

 

[Knuckles]

ive just downloaded autocad 2016, so ive gone from 2006 to 2016.

OMG I cant use the thing, so bloody different. im struggling to do the most simplest of things

I don't know how you're still using autocad tbh

I've never been able to get on with it. It's so unintuitive.

Pm me your email address over and I'll send you that heel and toe pedal tomorrow.

I've also got some reference material I think you'll appreciate.

 

[Andy_con]

I don't know how you're still using autocad tbh

I've never been able to get on with it. It's so unintuitive.

Pm me your email address over and I'll send you that heel and toe pedal tomorrow.

I've also got some reference material I think you'll appreciate.

been using autocad 2006 for so many years, theres not much I cant do in it. plus I don't do mega complex stuff.

will send over now, cheers

 

[TonkaTruck]

@Matt e I've got this in Illustrator. I can create the rest if required.

 

[Andy_con]

are these the best setting to use for scaling?

 

[botfch]

That's fine if its just linework assuming its not be drawn to a scale already, there is no "bestway".

By the looks of it that's OS data which is always miles out anyway, if its accuracy you are worried about.

 

[Andy_con]

That's fine if its just linework, there is no "bestway"

By the looks of it that's OS data which is always miles out anyway, if its accuracy you are worried about.

measurement of foot way on site and on os match so its good enough.

 

[Rob]

are these the best setting to use for scaling?

Ok I'm going to say it again. What on earth are you talking about?

Model space should be drawn at 1:1

Then create a paper space, whatever size you want the output to be. Then get a viewport onto that paper space and zoom to extents. Check the scale at extents and this will give you some inclingagion of an acceptable scale for this drawing.

I.e day it says scale - 0.0123

Then you could wind that down to 0.01 which is 1:100 and it'll still fit.

You then print your a3 paper space to an a3 PDF at 1:1 units.

The way you're doing it silly (imo) and not the correct way all in all.

I'd be happy to sit and teach you some bits at some point if it helps?

 

[Andy_con]

All my drawings I do at 1:1 scale.

But yes I want to create a3/4 paper and add a viewport and then scale the drawing to say 1:200 or 1:100 etc...

I've closed down my laptop now, but I need to learn how it works. I'm fully self taught on CAD, never had a lesson so there's a few things I don't know.

I need to learn scaling and setup a temple so I can add an info box - date, drawing number, scale etc...