Any IC Drawing users in here?

[EKERN]

We're a relatively small engineering company that recently decided to give IronCad a try. We’re currently on IC 2019, newest version.

Most of the other Mechanical Engineers onboard have their main experience from AutoCad 2D, whereas my own experience is mainly with SolidWorks and Inventor.

 

I’m curious to know; are there any other companies out there using IronCad as their main modelling tool?

The scenario I’m interested in is something like this:

 

You are working individually and in teams. In other words; IC might be running from individual computers, but the .ics and .icd files must be saved on a server (don't they?), so that everyone has access to them.

You are using IronCad Drawing (not CAXA) for technical drawings. And it works like a charm?

 

Well, In our case, it doesn’t. Modelling works like a charm, it really does. But when it comes to technical drawings we’re running into serious trouble. Especially moving views around and making annotations is agonizingly slow and not smooth at all, like in SW or Inventor.

 

And it’s natural to compare this to at least Inventor, since it’s running alongside IC on the same computer with no issues at all (at least not those kind of issues).

 

Making a simple model and a technical drawing in IC Drawing, in IC 2018 on my laptop computer works fine. Making the same simple model and technical drawing on my desktop computer does not. So clearly something is going on between the two files that is slowing things down.

(It might be worth mentioning that we got a brand new server installed just two days ago).

 

How does bigger companies deal with this? Or is IC not fit for this kind of use?

 

[rsaucier]

Good morning,

 

I can personally speak to this as to I work with models that are 60 to 70 thousand parts and ICD works very well. I will give in that when I am doing a view of the entire model, it will slow down a little bit, but not to the extent that I would consider it an issue. Maybe support can help you trouble shoot but to me, if there was an IronCAD issue, I would probably see it with files this size.

 

RJ

[Mike Allen]

Our company has been using IronCAD for drawings since about 2000 (in at least some capacity.) We started with about 7 seats. Now we have several dozen users - our entire engineering department switched from Pro-E to IC a few years ago.

 

All of our working files are stored on our network. Over the years, I've seen extremely large files (around 1,000 parts) bog down in drawings, especially in precise mode, when trying to apply annotations. I haven't seen that so much with recent versions. I definitely see an occasional slowdown due to network access (e.g. opening a large catalog for the first time in a session.)

 

I don't have any problem with the dimension tools in IC. Even text formatting has gotten a lot better in recent versions (adding lists & indent levels.)

[tlehnhaeuser]

Hi EKERN,

 

My customer base uses the ICD drawing mostly with no significant issues, If they are having them, they are pretty quiet about it. Some customers that require more of a "drafting" capabilities for "production" type drawings will use CAXADraft which basically is an AutoCAD clone with some advantages. However personally I feel the ICD drawing environment is more user friendly and easier to use.

 

If you have any specific issues you'd like to share, I'd be happy to learn about them and offer and suggestions if possible.

 

Tom

[Mike Hatch]

We are a small specialist electro-mechanical company with two seats and have used IronCAD for 10 years. Models are a breeze with the ICD environment for production and assembly drawings. ICD has a few issues (dimensioning holes on draft or cylindrical faces being one) but not that we would not use it.

 

We do not use the Caxa environment for new designs but fall back to it for all of our old AutoCAD files that go back some 35 years, for this it is also pretty much seamless with its AutoCAD feel.

 

Both seats are on local relatively high speed PC's and video cards but not blisteringly good. Storage is on the network for both drawings and catalogs but intermediate work is local with around 1-2K parts max. Speed is not an issue but I have noticed (for me) that speed on laptops can occasionally be clunky.

Edited April 5, 2019 by Mike Hatch

[EKERN]

Thanks for your replies, everyone .

 

Just to clarify: The annoying little hick-ups in ICD are not related to huge projects in any way. Making annotations and moving views around in ICD running on my laptop (not connected to the local network) works just fine, seemingly regardless of size of the project. On our brand new desktop computers, however, it’s a completely different story.

 

Nevertheless, browsing through your replies it’s starting to dawn on me that there has to be something wrong with the way we have IC set up. Sadly, IC has not that many users in Norway, and support is basically one guy. He’s done quite a good job so far, but in this case he hasn’t been able to contribute.

 

 

[IronKevin]

Try transferring settings from a good working system to the poorly working system:

 

1. Run regedit.exe

2. Export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\IronCAD\IRONCAD 21.0

3. This will create a .reg file that you copy to the poor system and double-click to merge the settings.

[EKERN]

I suppose a little follow-up is in order:

 

The most recent update took care of everything, it seems!

 

Now ICD behaves more or less like one would expect from a 2019 CAD software .