mmccall Posted February 10, 2005 Share Posted February 10, 2005 Just a warning.. to double check yourself. I am working on an assembly for a customer..a mechanical jacking system.. Several of the vendor components are in metric units, bearings, track systems etc... while the rest of the assembly, or job shop components are in US system. In IC I have been creating the assembly and its components all in the same scene... building needed components along the way... As needed... I switch units from metric to US and back and forth repeatedly... depending on which component I am working on. After exporting the assembly to Pro... I noticed that some of the Dims were incorrect... Well...the best explanation I could come up with is that each time I switched my working units... the multiplied conversion factor along with my accuracy (set at 4 places) must have compounded in some way... 24mm.. over time degraded to 23.9966mm... This error was made even larger when Pro added its own conversion factor.. in any case.. several things no longer lined up. Customer was a little worried about accepting files from IC... I showed the same error was possible in Pro-Wildfire by modeling several components in an assembly in the same manner.. again.. 24mm.. degraded over time and things didn't line up. I should have been more careful.... Guys and Gals... if you are doing this... be sure to check your models before the export... A few things to minimize the error... 1) check the model 2) lower the place accuracy... check the model dims again... quick check with smart dims... 3) safe thing to do may be to model the components with different units in a separate file... that way there is only the 1 conversion to deal with... meaning when the conversion takes place when the component is assembled into the top assembly scene. 4) check the conversion factor in the receiving program. Hope this helps... a real lesson for me... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest EricFoy Posted July 15, 2005 Share Posted July 15, 2005 Just another good reason why the world should come to its senses and convert over to the inch! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cborer Posted July 15, 2005 Share Posted July 15, 2005 ...or better to meters! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmccall Posted July 15, 2005 Author Share Posted July 15, 2005 (edited) HA.... this is a loaded one... pretty funny looking back on it... We get into this all the time ... one of my customers is the DOE... and we deal with Physicists from around the world and here in the US.. Its really funny.... I am not up to speed in the metric system.. so I have to walk around with my calculator... We have files all over the place some in US .. some in Metric... can be a real pain..especially when coming down to weight and stress analysis... everybody is scrambling to make sure they have all the parts in the same system and that all the densities were input correctly... we got imported files... density of 1 ..HA... I have had assemblies with weights out to 12 places... !!!... making the earths rotation wobble... tennessee began to sank into the gound... maybe it would resurface upside down somewere on the other side?...HA... Well.. the debate will never end... but maybe we will all get on the same page... but until our speed limit signs change here... I guess we are safe... And when they do.. I am just going to run 100MPH and plead ignorance... HA Edited July 15, 2005 by mmccall Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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