AutoCAD MEP 2015 - Piping - Problems when changing units to meter

[ruipfbarreiros]

Hi,

In MEP 2015, something's not working right when I change the units of the drawing from the default "mm" to "m". When I insert an elbow, I get an odd looking elbow, like the one on the picture.

Has this ever happened to you?

Thanks

[Keith.Brown]

The reason is that you only changed the units of the drawing.  You need to also change the units of your catalogs, styles, etc.  To do this you will need to either close out of autocad MEP and start the program with the correct units or you can change your profile to either US Imperial, Metric, or any other profile that you have loaded that is set to the correct units.

** Edit **

I went back and looked at your picture and saw that you changed the units from MM to M.  I believe that MEP wants everyting to be in either mm or inches as that is the units that their catalogs are built on.

[ruipfbarreiros]

Sorry for the delay..

I kind of wondered if MEP would only work in milimeters, but I was always hoping it wouldn't be the case. I'd rather work in meter because all the other drawings of the project are in meters and I think that changing to milimeters would be a pain in the ****...

Anyway, having changed the drawing to meters, I can get all the pipes and fittings working correctly, except some "elbow fittings", which led me to think that maybe something was wrong with the catalog of those particular parts, but I can't figure out what could be wrong...

Any other ideas to solve this issue?

Thanks

[nima2009king]

hi I had a lot of problem when I want to modeling cable tray, some parts of the elbow that I model by mep is croupt or lost!! why? what is the reason of this problem , I attach one picture in pdf that shows this problem clearly if some body can help me it will great thanks deserve.

[ruipfbarreiros]

Hi,

You didn't actually attach any image but i'm guessing you'r having the same problem I had before. I managed to correct this problem a few days ago and I think this will also fix your problem.

To explain what is going on we have to understand how the pipes, pipe fittings, cable trays, etc are created. If you edit any of these parts in content builder you will see that it contains several variables that are used to create all sorts of parts (the reason why they are called 'parametric parts'). Among those variables are also some 'constants' which are causing the problem. You see, even though MEP catalogs were created in milimeters, if you work in a drawing in meters AutoCAD MEP ALMOST successfully converts the catalog from milimeters to meters. The only stuff it can't do is change the value of constant variables. This is the part you need to change yourself.

For example, for a "cable tray mitered transition elbow ladder flange out", if you edit this part in content builder you will see two variables LenA3 and LenA4. These variables have the value of 0.001. The problem is that when you work in meters, these constants won't change. To fix this, what I do is set these values to 0.000001 (can't really change them to 0.0). You may want to save this with another name which may reference that this part is now suited for a meter drawing.

I actually never done this to cabletrays but I've done this to some pipe fittings and it worked. If it doesn't work right away, maybe you'll have to try changing some other variables until you get what you want...