Rick Dorrington

Ok, I'm giving in on this one. I going to make a screw catalogue and have been trying to figure the best way to go about it. The trick is to get the screws you want and still get the 2D representation. The problem then is that you can never go back to the "Fastener" tool once you drop the screw into a scene. So be it, I guess. Now that I've come to grips with the time I need to invest in this, I would like to know from the Ironcrew whether this will be worth the effort. I would hate to spend the time and energy only to find that the "Fastener" tool has been/is being improved to have workable functionality. What say? Also, is there any chance that the source could be made available so that the community could put this together?

Oh yeah. It works. A bit jumpy to be usable right now but definitely an improvement over the current IronCad support. Good Job. spaceball.zip spaceball.zip spaceball.zip spaceball.zip

Chris, Forget the Triball. It's all about camera controls-no keyboard modifiers necessary with the SpaceBall. The "ball" gives you complete freedom of movement in any axis or all simultaneously. The included software allows you to assign buttons to all sorts of functions. The user can customize to his liking. If you want to add Triball functionality later that would be fine (would be pretty cool) but I never imagined that the SpaceBall was meant for anything other than camera.

Chris, What does that tell you? Some things are just not going to go away. We have heard that the next release of EdgeCam (v7.5) is going to support the SpaceBall. Oh, if only IronCad...

Good answer, 10 points for the Iron folks. In the meantime. Here's an example for a 120 degree inclusive chamfer as applied to a hole. (30 degrees complementary) You need two pieces of information. Xid=red> = (Chamfer diameter - Hole diameter)/2 (Or any value being the length of the desired chamfer) and the formula X*TAN(PI()/6)id=red> Where 6 derives from 180/30 (Somehow converting Degrees to Radians) If I understand your post correctly you would substitute 12 (for the value 6) in the above formula. (180/15=12) Depending on which way you want your chamfer to go you would plug the values in the chamfer dialogue boxes as follows: If you want the chamfer applied on the diameter (This is how I normally use this) put the formula in the first box and use the X value in the second box. If you want the depth of your chamfer to equal X with the angle applied towards the surface, use the X value in the first box. It also seems to work backwards when applied to an edge. Once you get the correct values it is easy to switch them around in the boxes to get the chamfer that you want. I hope this makes sense.

Merry Christmas to everyone out there. Have a safe and happy holidays.

Interesting topic. I'm surprised there haven't been more opinions on this one. I don't envy being in Bill's position having to justify a few dollars for a machine that is going to make money for the company. As with most things you purchase, "You get what you pay for". I understand it can be hard to see the value and even harder to show others where it is. Going cheap in a CAD workstation is false economy. As far as picking a supplier I'll go along with sticking with the big boys. We have been on every side of the fence and the best by far has been our dealings with IBM. I agree with Walter that DELL uses local computer techs to handle their service and this is where the problems lie. It sounds like Walter and OneMark have a good system going for them but it's also likely that they have the staff to support bigger accounts. Your local guys are selling computers to the 50+ crowd so that they can email their grand kids. Even if the local guys are competent they often don't have the time to address your issues in a timely manner, they are likely burning a candle at both ends. We had an IBM server go down .(Yes they do) The IBM guy showed up in about 90 minutes, with an IBM truck full of IBM parts. He quickly determined that the voltage regulator on the motherboard was faulty. One phone call and the parts were in a taxi and at our door 90 minutes later. 15 or so minutes to re-assemble and our server is back up. Total time about 3.5 hours. Then he spent another day looking at our tape drive and ended up coming back twice to replace it. He kept at it until it worked correctly. He gave us his 24 hour phone number and said on the way out "call me ANYTIME". Cost for this service: Nil, under warranty. If your business depends on your computers like ours does then you don't have enough time or money to fight with them. Choose wisely.

Right on Dave. It's false economy to think you are saving money with a cheap video card. Add up the time waiting for things to happen over the lifetime of your system and you lose big.

We'll soon see. I don't know what all the fuss is about. (I think 2 cents US is about 3.1 cents CAN today) It just goes to show you that your money isn't worth as much as ours. Cheers Rick

Ok folks, Reset my profile to GMT. Same times displayed at posting. Reset my profile to Eastern. Times now correct. Must have needed to "kickstart" the server or something.

Kevin, Thanks for the advice. We did eventually rebuild the model ourselves to get on with the job. Dave Lalonde was kind enough to investigate the original files for us and has verified that they are indeed faulty. The only way to really deal with this problem is to put our cards on the table with our customer. In the long run it's probably the only way to have a satisfactory relationship. If we had to redo all their work it would skew the input/return ratio way out of whack. The idea is that customers with models get good value because the "re-engineering fee" doesn't apply. Cheers Rick

What gives?

Alex, If I do my math correctly, your posting is at 8:02 PM, considering that the time here (Eastern) is 3:19 PM, you must be about 5 hours east of us, or somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Rick

Why is it that the time of day on the postings is incorrect? My profile is correct and I'm pretty sure that Atlanta is in the same timezone as we are. Are we on GMT or something? Rick

Time to re-visit the previous post. We are having extreme difficulty with a customers' files. We have tried STEP, ACIS, PARASOLID, different versions of everything, you name it. We used to get by using the trick in the previous post but it doesn't seem to work anymore. We have run these files through StepTools and they always fail in some way. We can get an ACIS file (with errors) but never a PARASOLID. This customer is using IDEAS. I have included the header of a recent STEP file they have sent to us. If we had to wager on a guess, we would postulate that the original models are bad. Our difficulty; How do you tell a customer that their models are no good? We would like to be able to help solve this problem with our customer. Does anybody have similar problems with IDEAS? Any suggestions? Best Regards, Rick ISO-10303-21; HEADER; /**************************************************************** * Generated by software with PDE/Lib inside * * PDE/Lib Version 3.2.5, created Wed Apr 04, 2001 at 18:42:38 * * International Technegroup Inc. (www.iti-oh.com) * ****************************************************************/ FILE_DESCRIPTION((''),'2;1'); FILE_NAME('/disk2/users/ideasadm/Grundplatte_ap203.stp', '2002-11-19T12:53:05',('User'),('SDRC'),'I-DEAS Master Series 9','UNIX', 'Yes'); FILE_SCHEMA(('CONFIG_CONTROL_DESIGN', 'GEOMETRIC_VALIDATION_PROPERTIES_MIM','SHAPE_APPEARANCE_LAYER_MIM')); ENDSEC; DATA;

At least a couple of weeks I would think. I don't know much about OpenGL but I thought it was a "standard". Like IGES I guess. Quartz extreme is pretty cool, and OS X is amazing.

If the IronDudes would port to BSD Unix you could run it on your PowerBook G4 Titanium. ooooohhh, I'm drooling.

What would be nice would be the ability to "lock" a configuration. This way any drawing associated with the configuration would not be accidently messed up if the configuration was changed without the knowledge that a drawing or sheet was associated to it. It's easy to inadvertently forget to change your configuration when you are working. We've probably all done it and had to rebuild the configuration to satisfy a drawing sheet associated with it. Just a thought. Rick

Oh Yeah, While we're at it, I'm pretty sure that they make screws less than 1 inch in length. It would be nice to have them in the pull-down.

Joel, You could do that. Let's have everyone in the world create their own custom catologues of screws and washers. Or, you could take advantage of the power of the software to standardize the fastener tool so that everyone is on the same page. One of the things we considered when purchasing IronCad was the ease of creating fasteners. I don't mean to shoot you in the head here because you are correct. We can b!tch about this until we're blue and it probably won't get fixed anytime soon. It shows well at demo time. You obviously work in the real world where things have to get done quickly and the only way to do it is to create your own cataloques. This would certainly be low on my list of priorities, ( We have MUCH larger issues with our CAM) it's just that it would be nice to be able to use the fastener tool and have it accurately represent what it is that we want.

It would be nice to be able to specify the included angle of a tapered type screw (82, 90 etc). Also would be nice to be able to place a washer under the screw at the same time as the screw is dropped in, like you can with a bolt. ( In the case of a screw with a flat bearing surface.) Now, does anyone know an easy way to drop a screw with an 82 degree taper ( or otherwise) into a matching countersunk hole so that the screw stops when it seats in the hole? Most times the countersink is sized such that the screw sits below the top surface of the workpiece, and in some instances we have to control the depth of the screw head. Also, the hole size is usually larger than the major diameter of the screw to allow for fit clearance.

Chris. Are 3ish31_IronCAD-5.2.exeid=red> and ICDShellExt.exeid=red> included in SP1?

Good work team. "Fetch" ing now. (Watched you building the path, look out for those es's) You gotta love ftp.

We can't seem to get anywhere with this either. Even tried to "Fetch" with no luck, which is unusual.

Just an idea here, since this seems to pop up regularly. Why not have the programmers speak "user english" and change -ERROR 1706, no valid source- to something like: Please insert your Innovation Suite CD.