Dimensioning at non-orthographic angle

I may not understand something in your message, but if you plop in an isometric view, it asks you if you want to have projected or true dimensions. If you choose true, you can just put in real dimensions. Sometimes the witness lines won't go the way you want, but at least they are correct numbers. Is this what you are looking for?

WT

The object I am dimensioning is a weldment of square tubing. The tubing is at odd angles, some acute and other obtuse. If the tubing is laying horizontal or vertical, I can dimension it easily by selecting the most extreme points. Below is an example in ACSII art; (View with a monospace font like courier) _______________________________________ / , '| / , ' | / , ' | /__________________________, ' | | | | | |

Sounds to me like you're doing about the only thing that would work (with sketch lines). Cumbersome.

In the case where the part is simply not alligned to one of the standard planes this can be done in the part.

In the case where you are trying to dimension features which do not show their true length in any of the standard orthographic projections it is necessary to create an auxilliary view in which the feature is shown in its true length.

It might also be possible, though not standard to show in an axonometric projection and choose true length instead of projected length.

Thanks for the suggestion, but in this case the part is a weldment. I can't create a view of a single member of the weldment. I will e-mail you the test drawing I created, but I suspect that I am stuck just drawing construction lines which are what I dimension to. I just finished a more elaborate part done this way, and it wasn't so bad because the angled parts are only a few pieces out of the whole.

Joe Dunfee

Joe,

You can create a view of a single weldment part.

Search in the SolidWorks help for "weldments, weldment drawings"

Hope this helps. CG

is this what you want

|| | / | / | / | / | / | / | / |/

There are 3 dimension tools There are Horizontal, Vertical and Smart to get a dimensionlike this you could do Smart or Horizontal. Select the line and drag the dimension up beyond the top point of the line and then move it to the right until the dimension priveiw snaps the direction you want or drag down to the left to get the Vertical. If you RMB and select more dimensions you will see the horizontal and vertical dimension tools these work on angled lines with no fus.

If this isn't the case you should project auxilary views to get a true view of the desired objects (this would be the correct method from a drafting perspective). Or you can cheat and create a true view in the model and save it as a named view. Then you can create a new view using that named view.

Corey