Erratic wire routing behavior

[dokppk]

Forgive me if this is a silly question, I'm two days into using Autocad Electrical, coming from standard autocad. I'm simply trying to use the wire tool to join a pin on a contactor coil to a pin on a custom symbol I built. I have zero idea about standard techniques in ACE so I'm likely drawing/linking the relay contact combo wrong but when i try join A2 from the coil to pin AO of U1, the wire will take a very strange path to get there.

I'll attach the dwg here, can anyone tell me what's wrong with the drawing?

[dougmcalexander]

The problem is with the Feature Scale Multiplier (FSM) in Drawing Properties.  You have it set to 20.  That makes the wire connection trap too coarse.  It's best to set the FSM to 1 and scale the library if you need the components to be 20 times larger.  The FSM scales everything that gets inserted, including connection dots, angles tees, etc., and it also controls the offset when two wires connect to a wire connection. 

You can set the scale factor from the Icon menu, while inserting symbols, but this doesn't affect symbols and offsets that are managed by the software.  So, if you don't like the size of the symbols that come with he software, it is best to copy the symbol folder and use the Modify Symbol Library utility to scale the entire library. 

I am curious why you set it to 20, since the software comes with IEC symbols that are already scaled to fit an A3 drawing nicely.  I have attached a screen capture from one of the drawings I use when teaching AutoCAD Electrical for those who use the IEC standard.  The symbols you see in the drawing are from the IEC symbol library that is included with AutoCAD Electrical.  I did not scale them at all.  The FSM is set to 1 and mm full size.

[dokppk]

Thanks for the reply. I set the component scaling to 20 because when I inserted the components they were extremely small with reference to my border. Do you know why this could be? My border appears to be 420 x 290, standard A3 size. This problem occurred before I switched the library from NFPA to AS as well. I'm working in metric.

[dougmcalexander · Accepted solution]

If you are set to use the AS symbols, and your drawing is indeed an A3 size, the stock symbols should work just fine. The NFPA symbols will be much too small for an A3 drawing.  Also, unless you purged the NFPA symbol blocks after deleting them, you run the risk of getting one of them when you click to insert an AS symbol.  This is because the symbols are named the same in all libraries, in support of the Library Swap utility.  The IEC and AS libraries include some symbols that are not found in the NFPA and JIC library folders, so for those you will get the AS symbol, even if you previously inserted NFPA symbols into your drawing.  There is a purge option in Project-wide Utilities.  You must be careful what you purge.  I don't recommend using the vanilla AutoCAD Purge, because you could inadvertently purge layers, text formatting, etc. that is needed.  Delete the NFPA symbols off the drawing and then run the purge option that you see as a checkbox, under Project-wide Utilities.

One of my Australian clients chose to use an American ladder diagram layout, even for Australian projects.  They still use the AS symbols though.  But for their North American clients they needed to use the ANSI symbols, like the ones in JIC and NFPA.  While I was there, I scaled the ANSI (NFPA) symbols up by a factor of 25.4, using the Modify Symbol Library utility.  So, when they work on a project for North America, they use the pre-scaled symbol folder.  

The bottom line is this.  I teach my clients to use the Feature Scale Multiplier as an option to gently nudge symbols up or down in scale.  Because of how the wire connection trap can be affected, I recommend keeping the FSM between 0.5 and 2, but preferably 1.

[dokppk]

There we go, that fixed it! I simply replaced the paths to the NFPA libraries with AS and it must have still been using the NFPA components. After the purge, everything is sized correctly. Cheers.