Inserting wire gap (loop)

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to insert a loop around a wire crossed by another.  The AEWIREGAP command works in certain areas of my drawing, and not in others.  It lets me pick the wire to remain solid, but then it doesn't get past the "Select crossing wire to gap:" prompt.

My wires were initially lines, not the wire that Autocad Electrical can insert for you.  However, if I'm drawing two new REGULAR lines (not wires) that intersect each other, I can insert the wire gap where they cross each other (loop in this case).

Drawing properties -> Styles is set to Wire Cross: Loop.

Thanks.

[jseefdrumr]

If two wires are very close to one another, ACADE will not insert a wire gap.

Also, in order to be thought of as a 'wire', the following conditions must be met:
*must be a LINE (not an arc, polyline, spline, etc)
*must be on a wire layer

For whatever reason, the gap command works on non-wires, but only partially: it will place a gap on a line that isn't a wire, but it will not place one on a polyline at all.

So, check to make sure your wires aren't too close together, and make sure they are, at least, LINES. No other entity types.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jim,

Nothing leads me to think they would be polylines or else, although I'm not sure where that would be revealed exactly.

And how close is too close?  Aside from crossing lines touching each other, the others are nowhere in the surroundings where I want to insert the loops that I would deem "too close".  Besides, in the same space in between rungs, if I insert two new lines, I can insert a loop at their intersection.

As for layers, I don't know.  I tried to make all lines on the WIRES layer and re-insert loops, to no avail.  Again, it however seems to work when they are fresh lines from layer 0.

The attached gives you an idea.  Already shown loops were inserted completely "by-hand".

Thank you.

.

[jseefdrumr]

You can check to see if a line is a LINE or a POLYLINE by looking at it in PROPERTIES. Just select the line and then go see what the properties are.

If you don't have polylines in there, then there's something else going on. If that's the case, can you post the drawing?

As for how close is too close, I think it's tied in to the size of the arc that makes the gap. Like, I want to say that the wires need to be a minimum distance of the arc's radius plus a small amount. So, nothing you're showing here should be experiencing that.

[Anonymous]

Found the object type (Line) was indicated on the very first line in the Properties...  so obvious I did not see it before.

I could confirm at least that yes, everything is "Line".

I attached a partial drawing, which misbehaves the same way as the original.

[jseefdrumr]

So, you're drawing with a base unit of millimeters, but your Feature Scale Multiplier is set to 20 and 'inch'. I think that this combination is preventing the software from being able to generate the gaps at all.

In your drawing properties (AEDRAWINGPROPS), go to the 'Drawing Format' tab, and make the following changes:
*set multiplier to 1
*select 'mm full size'

I did that in the drawing you posted and got wire gaps to show. They were a little big to my taste, but that can be fixed with SMALL, TINY adjustments in the scale feature multiplier. Generally speaking, this number should stay as small as possible because it affects everything from symbols to wire gaps to the trap distance for wire connections. Big numbers can have outsize effects. (My personal rule of thumb on the multiplier is, no bigger than 2, no smaller than 0.5.)

If this drawing is part of a project, and you need to fix more than the one, then make the changes to project properties and then push them out to all the drawings.

[noakes_eng]

Thank you, this solution worked for me by changing the multiplier.