I am drawing a skew-ended pipe. There will be several of these, welded together to make a bent pipe.
I am having difficulty creating a dimensioned drawing from my model.
One end of the pipe is extruded to a plane that is angled around the z-axis. That is OK in the drawing: I can create a base view looking across that face and give it an angular dimension (45 deg).
The other end is extruded to an angled plane that sits on a rotated axis; the axis is in the y-z plane at 30 degrees to the y-axis and the angled plane is the 35-degrees from the normal to the y-z plane. (This is just for illustration, the actual values are not integers).
I want my drawing to show:
- the centre-line length
- the angle between the pipe axis and the second end plane
- the twist angle between the end planes (angle of the AA section).
To add a centreline length (i) I would need to create a point where the right-hand end plane in the base view intersects the centreline. There seems to be no way of doing this.
To show the angle of the right end (ii) I need to create a section that looks flat along that end (just like the base view does for the 45 degree angle). I tried creating the section AA to do this, by eye, but I cannot hit the exact angle (30 degrees) needed. I've sketched a line through the section AA leader and the dimension is 30.56 degrees - adjusting this value does not move the line.
I also tried sketching a line at 30 degrees and putting the AA endpoints on that line. That is good visually (one seems to be looking straight across the face) but the dimension tool will not pick up on the face in the way it did with the 45 degree end. Even if it did though, I would have a problem when the end angle is not an integer - if I could specify it to 8 decimal places would that be good enough?
I suspect this is a silly way of doing it - I would do better to model a 3D path, draw the pipe along it, cut it in sections and create a drawing for each section. That doesn't actually solve the problem because (a) one cannot dimension a 3D sketch line in a drawing at present and (b) I would need a "plane bisecting two lines" in the model to cut the pipe into sections (seems an obvious feature, please add it!).
