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manual nesting suggestions?

I have several 2d shapes that I need to nest on a sheet for laser cutting. At the moment, I have the planer surface from each mated coincident to the front plane of an assembly with a bounding box representing the material sheet size minus kerf. The issue that I am having is that translating the location (xy) is real easy. Controlling the rotation of individual parts is a real pain. If you click on the rotate component button the part kinda sorta slides around the screen and does not seem to be rotating around any specific point. At the moment I am having to set rotation angles through editing angular mates and it very slow progress.

I realize that there is automated nesting software available, but a human being will beat the best software 99% of the time with a bit of time investment. The material is quite costly and 15% savings adds up quite fast.

Is there a way to set the point that a part rotates about ( ie center of mass ) in an assembly by default so that its not necessary to create, and edit multiple times, mates for each part ( or instance thereof )? Am I missing a setting option somewhere?

Reply to
Brian
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I do that in an assembly. I mate the cutouts to a plane and use the pick and move capability of my spaceball to position everything. Just like working a jigsaw puzzle.

Reply to
TOP

Brian,

Use the Rotate/About Entity option. But first add a normal line ("z" direction) to all of your planar profiles. Then you'll have a line entity to rotate about. Now, "Rotate Component", select your profile and choose Rotate/About Entity and select the normal line to rotate about.

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Reply to
Paul Salvador

Thanks that was the tip I needed. I had assumed that, when using the "rotate about entity", the entity could not be within the same component that I wanted to rotate. I was in the process of dropping in and mating up

Reply to
Brian

Kewl. I agree it would be nice (ER) to have a point with a assumed normal or centroid to rotate about because as it is now, it is flaky, imho. BTW, I should have said use a 3DSketch line because it's easy to move about the planar face just in case you want to quickly move the rotation reference.

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Reply to
Paul Salvador

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