"dakeb" wrote in message news:bnal3v$6gp$ snipped-for-privacy@rdel.co.uk... : Guys, : : I am making a simple cable assembly, a atraight piece of wire between two : connectors. I don't want to use ProCable for this, so though I would use a : solid pipe feature. Trouble is the pipe only shows up as a centre line, no : surfaces displayed.
This question of substitutes for their routed systems packages has come up a few times. One of the last times, someone pointed out 'Insert>Advanced>Pipe' as a way to create pipes without first creating a curve trajectory 'thru points'. It is pretty handy: just create a bunch of points, actually, one at each place you want the pipe feature to change direction, then select them to create the pipe. But, as you point out, Dave, sometimes you don't get geometry. It seems like you created your pipe in assembly mode. You might have noticed that there was no menu reference to geometry. Now try creating the pipe in part mode. Besides prompting you for values for diameter and wall thickness, it gives you a menu selection for geometry. Geometry in part mode, no geometry in assembly mode (but parametric info does show up in a drawing). Oh, yeah, and I thought it might be a neat thing to have in sheetmetal to run some tubing around the outside of a housing: NO pipe feature in sheetmetal. : : I have my Environment set to show Thick Cables. : : So then I tried it as a swept surface. I created a straight datum curve : between two points. Then tried to create the sweep. It wouldn't let me : select the curve as a valid trajectory. I guessed it was because it was a : single segment curve, so I recreated the datum curve as a sketched curve : with two straight segments. This time the Sweep was happy with the : trajectory - go figure! Trouble is, the surfaces still don't show up! : Seems to me I remember the surface collapsing (but oddly, not failing) if the corner radius was too small.
: Finally, I created an circular extruded surface between the connectors, and : this time the surfaces did show up. Phew. : : But what is wrong that sweeps and pipes don't show?
I don't think it's one thing that's wrong. You have your choice of partial solutions outside of routed systems and they don't want to make them too good or you won't have to spend another couple quid on the good stuff.
David Janes