Tube & Pipe Connections easier to change....

[cbenner]

In Tube & Pipe, sometimes you have a run that is built fitting to fitting with no actual route involved.  See the example in the picture, it is made up entirely of pipe nipples and fitings... quite common in the real world of piping.  If, however, you need to make a change in the middle of one of these runs, you have to break all of the connections downstream of that change, and basically redo the entire line.  For some reason, T&P wants to recalculate (and often change) the rotation of each fitting, and so requires that the connections be broken first.

My Idea... is to fix this.  In my example line, the regulator needed to be pulled out of the line and reconnected facing the other way.  Simply rotating it 180 degrees won't work because then it would be upside down.  In order to accomplish this, all of the downstream connections between tees and nipples had to be deleted and reconnected.  A lot of work for a simple change.

[cbenner]

Another example this morning of why this whole concept needs to be looked at:  Look at the attached image.  I attempted to replace from Content Center, these 2 tees.  Neither could be replaced, the error was that it would cause the pipe segment to violate the minimum segment rule.  With face to face fittings.... there is no segment to violate!  If I want to replace these fititngs, I have to tear down the entire line and rebuild it.  Please... we NEED some T&P attention.

[Anonymous]

I've found that trying to run pipe this way to be so obtuse and easily broken that I'd rather just place a bunch of components and use the pipe tool to just make it look like the pipes are connected.  If I need to size for fittings/pipe sizes, I just generate them in the assembly environment so I don't have to deal with the headache.

[dan_szymanski]

This idea has been implemented within Autodesk Inventor 2017. All possible connections can be explored within the "Edit Fitting Orientation" context option, by depressing the space bar. This has been enhanced for both pipe runs that contain 3D routes or are simply joined together via connections. Special thanks to Chris Benner & everyone who cast a vote for it.