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I'm experiencing what appears to be a bug whenever I try to use the trim/extend tool in a frame assembly. When adjoining pipe together, pipe ends need to be coped to fit over abutting pipe members. We try to model this as best as we can to help give us better ideas on pipe lengths needed for purchasing and such, and to help our manufacturing floor better understand how things go together.
The issue I'm running into, is that we cope pipe ends 3/8". So, generally on nice perpendicular frame member connections, we can use the trim/extend tool to extend the pipe member to be coped 3/8" into the abutting pipe member - like shown here:
This works as intended for these nice perpendicular connections, but when you add in angles, Inventor acts funny.
Starting off, I have the angled pipe member going into the vertical pipe member based on the reference sketch:
Trim/Extend works when the entered value is zero or positive:
But, Trim/Extend acts funny whenever the entered value is negative:
Visually, in the preview before you hit OK, it shows it correctly,
But, whenever you hit OK, the pipe member shoots to the other side of the pipe member that was used as the "Tool" in the Trim/Extend action:
I would say that I could work around this by using the Lengthen/Shorten command afterwards, but you aren't allowed to run this command after a Trim/Extend action has been done.
We deal with a lot of these assemblies, and unfortunately doing away with showing these copes isn't really an option - so figuring out if this is indeed a bug, or if it's working as intended and we need to find another work-around, will help us figure out our next steps.
In your skeleton, are you drawing the pipe segments to the CL of the posts or are you holding back a certain distance from the CL of the post? Are you lengthening/shorting the members after you place from Frame generator prior to notching?
If I remember right, the notching of the pipes with perpendicular cut option selected will notch it as if the OD of the cutting shape or vertical post just touches the ID of the tube being coped. It also adds some addition cuts to curve the end vs a cut like I how below:
I have an example of below where both notch and a manual cut are shown:
Both give the same cut length:
The notching above is just having the horizontal rails tie directly into the post.
Just curious of your workflow in creating these is all.
On the frame skeleton, we are sketching to the center line (CL).
While it essentially does the same thing as lengthen/shorten, we use the trim/extend tool to trim the pipe before we use the notch tool.
With us using the trim/extend tool to extend the pipe into the abutting member 3/8", and then use the notch tool, we get the same affect that you have shown where you cut the pipe manually.
This seems to work just fine on nice 90°, perpendicular frames. The issue arises whenever we add in angles - it's like the trim/extend tool is getting confused and instead of extending the pipe on the "inside" of the abutting frame member 3/8", it extends it "outside" of the abutting frame member 3/8". Like what is shown in the pictures from my original posting:
"But, Trim/Extend acts funny whenever the entered value is negative:
Visually, in the preview before you hit OK, it shows it correctly,
But, whenever you hit OK, the pipe member shoots to the other side of the pipe member that was used as the "Tool" in the Trim/Extend action:"
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