Warning! Constrain your tube and Pipe Assemblys!!

[Anonymous]

I am posting this in case some other poor soul has a similar issue to myself.

I have made it common practise to constrain my sub assemblies to the master assemblies, however I have not got into the habit of doing it for tube and pipe assemblies.

I have spent the last day trying to find a misalignment issue in my tube and pipe assermbly. Extra bends and lengths of pipe were appearing between points i selected to make up for misalignment between the points.

My assembly is very intricate and extensive. After a while I realised that my points were not aligned because some of my pipe run was not square. I spent hours tracing the routes back looking for some reason why the pipes were not square and reconstrained/reconnected many pipe sections and equipemnt.

Finally I have figured out what was wrong! One of my tube and pipe runs files had rotated by 0.00031deg and my main tube and pipe runs file had rotated by a smaller amount. No idea why this would happen, but I will be taking steps to prevent it in future.

I applied flush constraints between my master assembly and the main tube and pipe assembly. And between the main tube and pipe assembly and each runs file.

Bingo, quick update and everything is square and lines up again.

[TBuccieri · Accepted solution]

Watch the first 3 minutes of this video. The gentleman does an excellent job at showing how to properly constrain Tube & Pipe runs.

The rest of the video is hlpful, if you use T&P on a regular basis.

[cbenner]

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@TBuccieri wrote:

Watch the first 3 minutes of this video. The gentleman does an excellent job at showing how to properly constrain Tube & Pipe runs.

The rest of the video is hlpful, if you use T&P on a regular basis.

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@salariua does a good job in his videos. Here are more thoughts on this.

[karthur1]

Kudos for Adrian's video.  Some good tips there.

[Anonymous]

A great video, thanks for posting it.

[salariua]

Gee, thanks guys...! I feel like taking you all out to lunch, so if you're in London area... drop me a message (it would probably be a boring TP subject we would discuss ).

Every mentor has its mentor so when I look for inspiration, I usually open cadtipstricks.wordpress.com.

I have actually reviewed 90% of the tube and pipe videos on youtube no matter the spoken language and if there’s one thing I would tell those guys (some are CAD support and resellers) is to hold the mouse over the directional arrows and start typing the dimension when creating routes. Most of them hover the pointer over the direction then right click, choose Enter Dimension and only then they can enter dimension value.... lot of wasted time.

I do intend to create a new video with all the advanced, tricks like dynamic edit, pipe clips or quick design variations.

Here’s a nice post on TP by @cbenner and myself.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/attn-tube-amp-pipe-genius-cbenner-are-you-...