What did you do Today 2024

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Well, yesterday and very early this morning…. when I gave up and switched the confuser off at well gone midnight.

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An afternoon of wrestling my meagre stock of scaffolding together in connection with work on my workshop building; then something like 3 nocturnal hours trying to create the drawing for replacement feed clack valves for my loco.

They need be made specially because the boiler bushes have Brass rather than ME or BSP threads…. as I found when trying to fit the three new valves I’d bought at “The Fosse”. At nearly £18 each, at that.

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I wanted to solve two problems: orientation, and re-cutting worn seats.

Orientating simple screw-in fittings entails many attempts with copper shim washers, giving multiple potential leaks so I thought I’d make flange-fitted valves using a screw-in adaptor, marked in-situ for drilling and tapping, and profiling, from the valve itself for its specific bush.

And solve the second problem by using a separate part for the seating and inlet connection; so it can be removed for re-cutting. Not my idea, but not often used as far as I know.

So to drawings…

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Due to limited ability I now use CAD only quite rarely and for simple items, like these valves with their 5 separate parts (+ 2 studs and nuts). However, I set up the drawing carefully from new, menu by menu, step by step; and was confident the programme said it would automatically save the work every ten minutes.

It was not easy, with rather awkward dimensions to work out. Still, I almost finished drawing the valve and its components, and even verified the ball lift by moving a copy of the seating and ball to their assembled position*.

Though by now I was really too tired for anything so difficult, and did something unknown but daft that moved the displayed grid area far from the origin hence the drawing.

Far? The scale revealed hundreds of thousands of inches! I didn’t know it could go that far – over six miles… Still, TurboCAD is used by architects as well as engineers so may need such level of sprawl.

All attempts to return failed so I thought I’d try closing the file and re-opening it, losing only the last few moves.

That worked as far as returning to the origin, but it lost all but the two circles I’d made before saving them to create the file in the first place.I’d been wrong about the auto-saving; perhaps had failed to switch it on.

The best part of three hours’ effort just… gone.

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Gave up and went to bed, at gone 1 a.m. So, yes, some of What I Did Today after all.

 

…….

 

*Assembly:

TurboCAD is far more powerful than Alibre Atom, but has no “Assembly” system. It cannot “Assemble” the 5-part valve from 5 individual “Part” drawings – or the 500-part locomotive from 500 drawings. You have to draw the entire project in one.

It does have “Layers” apparently for different line-formats, and to hide or display separate items visually, but I can never use them properly. It also offers “Blocks” which I think allow copying parts and sub-assemblies around a drawing, or even between drawings, but I do not know for certain.

[TomfileryParticipant @tomfilery]

Sorry Nigel,

But if you don’t even understand the fundamentals of TurboCad, how can you expect to be able to use it in a productive way?  Don’t rely on the auto save (which I think, saves to a Backup folder, rather than into the original file) and let this latest disaster be a lesson to you to save manually and regularly (so that you experience what you expected, rather than a total failure).  The software works how it works and not necessarily how you’d like it to work.

For assembling parts, the best way I’ve found is to make each of your drawn components a “Group”.  Highlight all items in the group and then select “Create group” – from the “Format” menu.  This holds all the elements of that component as a single object you can copy, paste and move wherever you want.  If you want to modify the Group content, you select “Edit Group Content” from the “Edit” menu and it opens another window inside the drawing where you can only see (and modify) the Group object.  Once done you click on “Finish to Edit Group” from the “Edit” menu and the item is replaced in it’s original position (unless you have moved it during the edit).

Blocks are similar to Groups, but different.  A good example would be if you created a drawing of a 6BA nut and designated that as a Block – using “Create Block” from the “Format” menu. When you want another nut in your drawing, you simply drag another from the block window (assuming you have that displayed).  The one possible advantage of a block, over a group, is that should you decide to modify the block, then all instances of that block in the drawing are altered automatically.

I presume you’ll ignore this response as per usual.

Regards Tom

 

[Robert Bowen-CattryParticipant @robertbowen-cattry70600]

Nigel, not sure if the software you were using will do the same, but as a general rule Ctrl Z will undo the last step.

[Nigel Graham 2]

On Nigel Graham 2 Said:

… Still, I almost finished drawing the valve and its components, and even verified the ball lift by moving a copy of the seating and ball to their assembled position*.

Though by now I was really too tired for anything so difficult, and did something unknown but daft that moved the displayed grid area far from the origin hence the drawing.

Far? The scale revealed hundreds of thousands of inches!

 

…

My sympathies are with Nigel because I made a similar blunder yesterday with SolidEdge, resulting in a fearful 40 minutes!    Though fairly fluent in SolidEdge, I haven’t used it in anger for about 6 months, and soon found my skills were rusty.  Nonetheless I carried on.  I wanted to move two parts in an assembly, and instead moved everything else in it miles off screen.  My mistake transposed the assembly, shifting it away from the origin.  Sounds like Nigel did similar, perhaps when he “verified the ball lift by moving a copy of the seating and ball”.

Finger trouble did both of us in for sure, and ctrl-z didn’t fix it!

I had to discover out that the assembly was split over a long distance rather than destroyed and then work out how to move it back.  Easy enough when you know how, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t find anything on the web that helped. There’s no good answer to questions like ‘I don’t know what I did, how do I mend it?

Since discovering my SolidEdge skills were flabby, I’ve put several hours practice in.  Still not recovered!  Even though I’ve done it before, I still can’t get SE to emboss text, a function it’s good at. I must be missing a step in the process.  Lesson for CAD learners : don’t expect to pick up anything as complicated as CAD after taking a long break without getting confused.     Infrequent use of complex software is asking for a beating.

Dave

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Oh, I was using TurboCad well within my abilities, but to have lost almost the entire drawing I must have mis-read or mis-set (or not set!) the auto-saving function in the setting-up menus. When this is on, I think it works every ten minutes. So when I switched off TC to see if switching it back on would default to the origin (it did) I did not save it. Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing the usual ‘Windows’ style prompt about saving…

I don’t know what I did to have leapt so far down-grid. That is odd.

The last move I’d been making was after that assembly-test. That had worked as I wanted.

I was trying to work out a suitable standard-spanner size hexagon for the lower part of the valve, because that is screwed into the valve body and trying to remove the union could just as easily unscrew the wrong part without a way to hold it still.

Really the hardest CAD move in the drawing had been finding how to draw tangents joining circles of different diameters, for the “oval” flange.  It’s not very obvious from the tool-bar.

 

I think “Help” sites are intended to tell you how to do something, ans sometimes even do; but rarely if ever warn what can go wrong if you make a mistake, and how to put it right. The “Undo” tool does not always work in such cases. This is where regular chosen or automatic saving can help, but if you think that’s happening and it isn’t….

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Besides me my PC sometimes misbehaves too. I’ve noticed for a long time now that I sometimes need log in twice to this site; and this evening the whole thing froze again and I could recover it only by turning it off at the mains. This happened a week ago and I had to re-install WIN-11 completely, a process that takes a very long time.

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Spent today battling with ivy on my workshop wall. Relaxing this evening by going to an organ recital!

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