Tube & pipe authoring best practices.

[awatt]

Could someone direct me to a 'best practices' discussion or other documentations regarding authoring parts for Tube & Pipe?

Particularly, I'm wondering how one should select the max & min engagement vaules.

I've looked at some of the content center parts, and they seem somewhat haphazard.  It seems odd to me that the min is set to 20% of the max.  I have a chart that gives hand-tight engagement for various NPT thread sizes, but I don't see those values being used in the default content center parts.

I'm also wondering how to determine the engagement values for JIC connections.  Perhaps an engagement of 0.0 where the 37 degree flanges contact?

[salariua]

I don't bother wtih having exact dimensions and engagements, nobody can bend or cut to CAD precision anyway.

You can have an engagement as "To Plane/Point" here's some info:

defining a maximum engagement plane.

You need to set your pipe minimum and increment length (in styles) to something really small like 0.001 so that the pipe can engage to your Plane/Point, and set your engagement percent to 100%.

From what I see the engagement percent takes into account the pipe length increment. If you set that too lose you will end up with gaps to compensate between pipe length (min+increments) and distance between nodes (fittings) which might not be divisible by the pipe lengths and it's increments.

[cbenner]

Adrian is dead on when he mentions pipe length minimums.  I always set mine as small as Inventor will let me (.001") this allows for tighter engagements on those fittings where I actually care about that.  (mostly I set them to zero so my pipes are buried in the fitting socket).  This also allows for certain types of fittings such as olets, to be set in a route 180 degrees apart with only .001" between them.... essentially in the same location for detailing purposes.  We do this a lot for locating electrodes in a pipe, top & bottom.  T&P won't allow them to be on the same node, but if your minimum pipe length is .001, you can locate two nodes that far apart.  So close it doesn't show up on a drawing.

[salariua]

Gee thanks,

Of course I am right, I learned from the best, Chris Benner, aka: The Tube&Pipe Guru.

[awatt]

Thanks.  Good stuff to know about the pipes.  At the moment though I'm looking more closely at my fitting-to-fitting engagements.  Has anyone worked with JIC fittings?