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sketching in an .idw, or is a .dwg better?

2 REPLIES 2
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Message 1 of 3
Anonymous
187 Views, 2 Replies

sketching in an .idw, or is a .dwg better?

Good morning,
I haven't been here in a long time. I've been out of work, now I'm back,
and my basic Inventor skills are really rusty. Here's my issue. I've got
various assembly drawings of rack mounted electronic equipment. I have to
draw some wiring diagrams from various ports to ports on the equipment. I
have 10 different assemblies that are similar but not exact replicas of each
other. I decided to create .idw's and drop front and rear views of the
equipment in each assembly (10 different .idw's) and sketch connecting
lines, add text, etc.
The problem is that if I want to copy these lines and text from one .idw to
another, I'm having a real difficult time. It seems that I can't right
click on the sketch and copy and paste.
If I activate the sketch, I can pick the lines and text, right click, and
SOMETIMES the copy command appears. The sometimes is what confuses me. If I
can copy, I go to my second .idw, and again, SOMETIMES the paste command
appears, but not always. If I can paste, it just drops the data where it
wants to and often it's very difficult to pick what I want to move it.
Someone suggested that I save the .idw as an Inventor .dwg and do my
sketching in AutoCAD. The problem there is if I want to move one of the
"views", I can't do that in AutoCAD. I have to close AutoCAD in order to
open the .idw to move the view and back and forth. It's driving me nuts.
Am I missing something?
Thanks,
John
2 REPLIES 2
Message 2 of 3
jlackey4740
in reply to: Anonymous

Are the changes vast as far as the lines go? You may be able to create a symbol, and then when you place the symbol in the drawing, you can edit the definition of the symbol, and then redimension the lines as necessary. Then again, when you edit the symbol, it will not show the view while you are editing it, so it may make it a little difficult and time consuming,

The only other thing I would try is this, make your initial drawing, add your views and sketches. Then check that drawing and the attached assy in, but keep a copy of just the drawing in your project folder. The initial assy needs to be out of your project folder. Then, bring in the new assy to your project folder. Open the drawing, and it will ask you to resolve the link between the drawing and the assy, so resolve it with the new assy. When the drawing opens, the view will show the new assy, and the sketch will still be there, so you can now edit it to work with the new view and not have to create the sketch from scratch. Other than that, I can;t think of any other way without redoing the sketch each time.
Message 3 of 3
jlackey4740
in reply to: Anonymous

I just tried to make sure that it works, and it's solid, so you should be good to try the second method that I talked about.

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