Do you do weldments of square structural tubing?

I would like to talk with someone who does weldments of square structural tubing in their normal work. This represents 80% of my work (I design the structural aspects of theatrical sets), and the final 20% will be mechanically actuated theatrical stuff.

When I saw the message titled "Goodby origin" I realized that I need to check into SolidWorks a little more before I really make the jump. See, I am just the kind of person to uncover bugs that others are perhaps not noticing because they do thing like most of the other users. I am hoping that talking with a person who does similar kind of construction will uncover issues that I won't be aware of as a novice with SW.

If you would be willing to talk with me, just E-mail me you phone number to call via the address above (which will be abandoned in a month or so), or via my real e-mail... lets see how can I put this on the message, but hide from the spammers...

joed AT(I think they spammers have figgured out how to convert "at" to @, but perhaps not this entire sentence) bibleonstage(DOT)com

Joe Dunfee

Reply to
Smiley
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Joe.. I do a fair amount of work with Rectangular Hollow Sections and weldments and this gives me one of my biggest frustrations with SWX. The software will not allow you to extrude if the sketch starts off on an edge (zero thickness error) and a work around is required. This usually involves a fillet of the offending edge, extruding off a sketch on the inside of the tube or creating a slight mismatch in the sketch.

This error can also pop up when doing a linear pattern along a tube if there is an existing tube at rightangles where the pattern feature lands. This is how the structure is made in the real world, but SWX can't model it without a workaround.

I wish they'd fix this. Maybe in 2004???

......but other than that, I pretty much enjoy using SWX.

Reply to
Cam Jackson

Would it fit into your workflow to extrude the new section as a separate body? This would dodge the zero-thickness issue (until another ferature tries to make everything merge).

SW has publicly stated that they have a new weldment environment in 2004. You should maybe have a look at the Pre-release ASAP. There are, of course, limitations. From what I've seen, and what you describe, it will be right up your alley.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

I've never thought of doing it this way Dale. I'm not worried about having just one body for the part and multi bodies certainly works. As a matter of fact I've all ready changed the way I design things using the multibody functionality and the part usually ends up back at one body. I'll be unchecking the merge button in future when I hit this problem.

Thanks a lot!

Reply to
Cam Jackson

Thank you for the heads-up. I may contact you again once I get into an actual project.

Is there a more active discussion group anywhere for Solidworks? I did search for a discussion group on Solidworks web site, and eventually found a link to one. However, there was much less activity there than here. On the Autodesk controled discussion group there are easly over 100 new messages a day. They've even loosened the controls to allow some pointed discussion lately.

My posts to Usenet (done via Google's group site) take around 1 day to appear on the list. Although, some people seem to see my messages before I do, because there is often a few replies when it does appear (I wonder why?). Of course, using the usenet also takes extreme measures to hide from spammers.

I find it hard top believe this is the most active discussion area.... any others?

Reply to
Smiley

hello Smiley, Just though I would butt in to tell you the best way to access this group is to sign up to a news server and use Outlook express or similar-your messages will appear in minutes-google is useful to search but way too slow. This group is pretty dead on weekends but I think has about 70 posts per day during the US week... at the moment SW users are a fairly contented mob whereas Inventor sufferers have been quite vocal...... There is another place where many people seem to go and can be found at

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..has a slightly different flavour to this group...probably more expert users here.....[.no I am not one : )] cheers

Reply to
neil

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