Midpoints

Sometimes the selection order makes a difference. You can also sometimes do a RMB and select the midpoint that way.

Also related to that, keep in mind that midplane extrusions give you a plane at the center. I always teach that you should use midplane extrusion unless you have some specific reason not to. You may not use that plane, but it's there in case you do need it, and a lot of the time, I line things up down the center.

WT

What release of SW are you on?

I am on 2005 v3.0. As I continued to work on it, I ended up making a new sketch and then converting the edges I wanted midpoints on. Then on that sketch I was able to snap to the midpoints of the converted lines. The puzzling thing is that sometimes you can get midpoints on objects, even if they are not lines on a sketch. I haven't figgured out the logic to it yet.

I do commonly work off of planes and the world origin, knowing that this is the easiest thing to constrain other things to.

Joe Dunfee

The "Select Midpoint" function is extremely quirky in SW, For example, try this. On any line, RMB and Select Midpoint. Ok, don't do anything with that, just hit esc or whatever. Now try to put a sketchpoint at the midpoint of the line, and it gives you an error saying that it can't put a point there because one already exists. Bummer. So put the point out in space and use a midpoint relationship between the line and the point.

Anyway, I always use midpoint relations rather than trying to do anything directly with the midpoint of a sketch entity. I had several sprs on midpoint selection. Best to avoid it in my book.

I have a little macro on my website that draws a rectangle centered on the origin for you. Hook it up to a hotkey, and you get a centered rectangle just by banging on a button.

matt

Thanks for the info. I fel I am often chasing my tail over little things like this. Since I am not that experienced with SW, I don't know yet when to blame the program or myself. This morning I spent about 3 hours trying to get a piece of metal on the midpoint of this assembly.

On a related note, my company decided against training for me, so I am just going to need to figgure it out by trail and error (and you guys here). The manual is never going to say something like "The "Select Midpoint" function is extremely quirky in SW". Later today I attempted to create an in-context weldment. But it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. It is possible I did something wrong, but it is looking like it may be one of those "extremely quirky" things.

Are there any 3-rd party books that are good about warning about things like this so we can avoid the "quirky" stuff?

Joe Dunfee

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:1116286890.717615.256460 @f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

There's also the "symmetry" mate option where you can select a plane and 2 faces, and make the faces symmetric about the plane. Usually modeling things symmetric about the origin does the trick. Covered in the first day of training

Perfect. Well, lets see. Training class costs say $1500. You just wasted

3 hours at say $75.hr. You only have to do that 6 or 7 more times and youre training would have paid for itself.

Next thing you're going to tell us that you're making molds with the SW mold tools or using the Piping module, just to hit the quirks hard.

No. Anyone who is published on this topic has generally felt the need to be polite and politically correct, which doesn't hamper most of us here.

After a while you'll develop an intuition and just avoid certain things. I don't mean to bust on the software too much, because overall I get the job done with it, and sometimes it's amazing, but I do have a bald spot from pulling my hair out and a flat forhead from banging it on the desk.