Hole Tool... The Hole Tool... Is it me or does it need work?

[kineoptics]

It seems like the Hole Tool needs work. OK, I select a surface and select the hole tool. BAM, it puts a hole in where I selected the surface. And, at the last size of hole I used. OK, so then I change the diameter or whatever, then select the + from the menu instead of the dot and whoa, the diameter changes. Then I select the constrain concentric or whatever and then something else changes. Is this just a bug that needs repair or is there another way.

 

[rocksvold]

Maybe. Here's what I do: I leave that hole where it is...no matter if it's way off. I give it the appropriate dimensions and then hit okay. Next; go to the design explorer and the hole is there...under that is a "sketch" you can edit for the hole. Right-click and Edit. You now see a point. You can draw a reference line to the point and then locate the point (angle and radius from center). When you click okay; it will be where you want and fully editable still.

 

[kineoptics]

Yes, I use the hole tool like that sometimes also. It just seems that sometimes, it just doesn't make sense the way it works. Also, the changing of the values is a real bother. The way I'd like to see the Hole Tool work is like this. You would select a surface, then the Hole Tool which when selected, the face would change to normal, then you would insert the values in the boxes (size, thread, counterbore, etc.). Then you would click on the locations you approximately wanted the holes, or if they were on a point, concentric with something, intersection, line, etc, they would snap to that location and possibly initiate a constraint. Then you would add constraints, dimensions, etc, then enter. Does this sound like a good way for the Hole Tool to operate?

 

[Mibe]

...for me it works exactly like that

I have tried to figure out (in this thread) what's wrong but I simply can't understand. The Hole Tool works exactly as all of you want's it to - at least as far as I understand out of these posts.

Could anyone describe exactly what is wrong so I also can test this?

 

[kineoptics]

SInce I have come from another program, I have been selecting the surface first and when done this way, it pops the first hole where you selected it. I have started selecting the hole tool first and yes, it works better. But it does still change entered information sometimes. Does the hole tool change values when you use it also?

 

[steveastro]

Re: Hole Tool... The Hole Tool... Is it me or does it need w

It seems like the Hole Tool needs work. .

I don't THINK I am hijacking this thread, but if I am, I apologise.
I have had fun with holes too, but I have attributed that to the fact I am waaay down the learning curve on a completely alien system - I am moving from an entirely drawing board based system straight into CAD.

Why can't I place a hole on a 2D sketch ? It seems the only way I can do a hole is to draw a circle, which doesn't have the properties of a hole.

How too do you set up a convenient reference point about which you can measure dimensions and place features ? I don't see how I can see the X,Y coords of my cursor except relative to the drawing origin. When I wanted to place a group of holes around a point in my drawing, I could only do it by drawing reference lines everywhere, when all I wanted to do it specify co-ords from a point in the drawing which was a key reference for the assembly.

The words I was looking for were "origin" "reference point" and "datum" and none of them seemed to help.

Thanks.

 

[jhiker]

You're not alone

You're not the only one having difficulty with the hole tool - see here..

http://www.alibre.com/xpress/forum/view ... 530cd079c1

 

[steveastro]

Re: You're not alone

You're not the only one having difficulty with the hole tool - see here..

I am struck with a sense of dawning horror, that Alibre isn't actually very good when it comes to doing real work. My old drawing board runs rings around Alibre for actual throughput. I was expecting this multi-GHz Box to be running rings around anything I could do by hand or brain.

All kinds of routine dimensioning operations seem to need (clever) "work-arounds" to do things that are obvious to a guy with a pencil and ruler. Operations I want to do to a part I have just drawn can't be performed because of the way I have already drawn something, like the piece of RHS I want to mitre can't be mitred (chamfered) because I extruded the basic piece from a section of material , rather than hollowed out a chamfered bar.

I am wondering if anyone designing Alibre itself comes from an engineering design background, or just graphic art ? Are these forums just designed as a place to blow off steam ?

Steve

 

[MilesH]

Re: Hole Tool... The Hole Tool... Is it me or does it need w

Why can't I place a hole on a 2D sketch ? It seems the only way I can do a hole is to draw a circle, which doesn't have the properties of a hole.

How too do you set up a convenient reference point about which you can measure dimensions and place features ?

Steve,

What properties does a 2D hole have?

Try using 'direct coordinate entry'.

 

[kineoptics]

Steveastro, It sounds like you have come from a 2D program. Did you get Alibre for 2D work or to start designing in 3D? Alibre is very good at getting real work done. I have been using Alibre now for 5 months and only a few days a week at that. My projects are complete, delivered, and the customer's check has cleared! I still occasionally run into issues but having briefly messed with Solidworks and especially Pro-E, I can attest that Alibre is by far as simpler easier program to learn. Alibre's learning curve is nothing compared to Pro-E. I had free use of a customers license of Pro and turned it down and bought Alibre. Keep using the tutorials and help feature and you will learn fast but you must get into 3D and only use 2D drawings when you have created your part in 3D.

 

[steveastro]

Re: Hole Tool... The Hole Tool... Is it me or does it need w

What properties does a 2D hole have?

It carries all the properties of its 3d representation, just like the ones on any 2d drawing - the call out that says "4mm drill 6mm deep" - that information is embedded in ALL the views of the object. The hole should appear when placed in the 2D sketch, in projection, so you see the counter sink/bore and thread.


.and direct co-ordinate entry is either from the absolute origin, or the last node, you cannot bookmark to return to the useful sketch node you added in just the right place, nor can you flag the node as being something special.

Steve

 

[steveastro]

Re:

Steveastro, It sounds like you have come from a 2D program. Did you get Alibre for 2D work or to start designing in 3D?.

I come from a drawing board ! The aim of my migration exercise is to end the unfulfilled requirement for a good instrument grade design draughtman in my company. My penmanship is not terribly good, and my draughtsman, who was brilliant, is now retired. He can draw faster than this CAD system, which somehow seems crazy.

Do you come from the same background and accept the limitations now you are on CAD, or have you been brought up on CAD ?

Steve

 

[MilesH]

The CAD system doesn't draw anything so, to compare the manual draughting speed of a particular person to it, has no meaning.

Miles

 

[kineoptics]

Oh, you mean a wood drawing board! I thought you meant some program called Drawing Board. OK, I started drawing with a pencil in 1975 and started using Autocad in 1985ish. I had a drawing board friend say it would never replace him and his pencil. Yea, right. No one will design and draw faster with a pencil that CAD. No discussion. CAD is computer aided design to me. The drawing is just a click away after the model is created, well almost... Take that wood drawing board and use it to put your computer on. Then get serious with the tutorial and start designing stuff.

 

[steveastro]

Re:

I had a drawing board friend say it would never replace him and his pencil. Yea, right. No one will design and draw faster with a pencil that CAD. No discussion. CAD is computer aided design to me.

The last three guys who I interviewed said the same, they came along with their favourite tools - one guy had inventor, the others AutoCad 2d of various flavours, all were highly experienced in 2D CAD. I had drawn a part myself, and knew how long this complex little shaft took me, a crappy draughtsman to draw. Their times were between 50 and 100% worse than mine ! They were horrified, and unemployed. I really just figured they weren't any good using their tools, despite their CVs, so I thought that I would try and do it myself, using their tools, or equivalents, and, to my suprise it really IS slower.

Why ? I have tried to do independent tests !

Steve

 

[kineoptics]

OK, after messing with the Hole tool after reading some of the above post and the hole tool instructions again, I see what is going on. First open the part or the part in the assembly. Select the hole tool and select your "drill bit" or "counterbore " tool, and the size of this "tool", depth you want to "drill", etc. Then click in the start surface box to select the surface you want to "drill", that surface will appear in the box and will flip to normal, and put in the first hole...(sometimes, it appears to stick once in a while selecting a surface). Then start putting the rest of the holes in, constraining, dimensioning, etc. The hole tool works better like this but I think it still needs some work. Not much though. I'd also like to see some canned counterbores for socket head cap screw sizes. Yea!!!!

 

[MikeHenry]

I had drawn a part myself, and knew how long this complex little shaft took me, a crappy draughtsman to draw. Their times were between 50 and 100% worse than mine !

Perhaps CAD applications are the wrong tool if you only need to design one simple part that will be fabricated in-house or by a small shop that you've long dealt with. In both cases a pencil sketch on a napkin is probably good enough and would almost certainly be quicker than starting up Alire, designing the part and then generating the drawing. For really simple parts the napkin design would take less time than starting Alibre alone!

The 3-D CAD applications are much better when one is designing a system of inter-connecting parts, especially when the features may change as the design matures. It's much easier to check interferences and fits on an assembly or sub-assembly than to try to piece all that info together from a stack of individual drawings.

My parts are usually fairly simple and I find that creating 2-D drawings typically takes me less than 1/2 hour to create once the part is designed and often only a few minutes. In most cases the driving dimensions for the part get me 90 % of the way to a finished drawing.

I usually make what I design, so a big benefit for me is that the drawing can be dimensioned to reflect the way it will be machined, which often means changing the basis for dimension offsets and the like to reflect the machine tool configurations that are available to me. Sometimes that comes in handy when I'm sitting in front of the mill or lathe with the original drawing in hand and realize that dimension bases are wrong. A few minutes with the computer and a better drawing results which helps avoid scrapped parts. A good machinist wouldn't have that problem of course, but I'm not in that class.

Mike

 

[jemmej]

For practical purposes (keeping focus on the hole issue). A hole must be created normal to a particular surface. If you try to place a hole within a 2D sketch, there is no surface for the hole to be normal to. In fact, there are a LOT of different surfaces that could result from the same sketch. Sp that is why you cannot place a hole within a 2D sketch.

As far as the 2D vs. 3D argument. You do realize that the SAME arguments were made when CAD departments were transitioning from board drafting to computerized 2D applications? Now, the same arguments are being used in the transition from 2D to 3D. The overall reason to transition is the same as it has always been, improved efficiency throughout the entire design process. Sometimes, to improve efficiency MORE time is required in a particular area in order to decrease even MORE time in another area.

Man vs. Machine tests were done during the computer revolution too. Guess what? The manual drafter won! alot! That was, until they figured out that they weren't accounting for all the time correctly. When that first revision came down the pike because the shaft needed to be 1.25" instead of 1" in diameter. Uh-oh, now you have to redo the entire drawing, or most of it. But, the intrepid CAD user finished the redesign quickly. Now calculate the total time. CAD wins, hands down.

When a 3D part is used in the preliminary design, it is VERY easy to complete all of the parts with a minimum of fuss. On top of THAT, being able to put the whole darn thing together in an assembly enables us to check for interference issues and other assembly issues well before we order prototypes.

So, even if we increase the ammount of time needed to effectively describe a part (3D model vs 2D drawing), we have reduced 2 prototype cycles (average protos was 3.3 per project, now 1.2) and thus reduced time to completion since each redesign necessitates new lead times. Thus, we have reduced total cost and total time, though the actual part modelling may have increased slightly (debateable in my opinion, but immaterial).

Of course, this is all my opinion.

Jim

 

[mrehmus]

I'm afraid you are missing the point about CAD, steveastro. Manual operations can frequently be faster than automated operations when working with simple parts.

But that misses the whole point of any automation process like CAD.

Sure you can draw a simple part faster if you are a novice CAD user. But you cannot draw the views, the Iso's, the cross-sections or make changes faster than Alibre will.

And you definitely cannot draw assembly drawings for a bit of complex machinery in 10 times what it will take you in Alibre.

 

[steveastro]

Re:

For practical purposes (keeping focus on the hole issue). A hole must be created normal to a particular surface.

Why ? Can't you draw angled holes through a surface ?

If you try to place a hole within a 2D sketch, there is no surface for the hole to be normal to. In fact, there are a LOT of different surfaces that could result from the same sketch. Sp that is why you cannot place a hole within a 2D sketch.

...but the sketch itself is a section of a 3D object, therefore the hole is normal to that sketch and normal to the section on the object. ? If ithe hole wasn't normal, the section would show an ellipse.

Steve