×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Trimming Tubes

Trimming Tubes

Trimming Tubes

(OP)
Hey guys.

I'm CADing a space frame for a car and I am having trouble finding a good solution for trimming\extending the tubes to they meet in a nice way where I have nodes or 90degrees corners without radiuses. Would you suggest I use sweep, pad, rib, ... or what?
I am working from a wireframe with only points and lines.

 

RE: Trimming Tubes

I would suggest you do the spaceframe as assembly, with each tube as separate part. In order to do so, I'd recommend having a reference part with points and lines (so you can change and fine-tune the design, and all the tubes will adapt to changes automatically*).

As for the problem of tubes, I have used method where I extruded the profiles up to the bisecting plane in the nodes- in order to keep it tidy, if a little bit more 'complex', I used extrude, up to plane, (right click on field where plane is selected) create plane, through point and a line, select spaceframe node as a point and (right click on a field where line is selected) create line, as bisecting and then select centerlines of tubes joining in the node.

* but you must enable option 'keep link with selected object' in options (Tools>Options>Infrastructure>Part Infrastructure)

RE: Trimming Tubes

(OP)
Thanks for the help, it was very helpful. That was a quick way to make that plane also, very nice.

I was though afraid I had to make all these sketches and planes for every tube. It's so much faster to just sweep around line with a certain radius but then it might be tricky to get the right connections in the nodes, right?

Do you know if it's possible to use the same sketch for different extrusions in different angles etc?  

RE: Trimming Tubes

(OP)
Oh that looks nice loki, don't know if there is a similar thing in CATIA. Can you do for multiple tubes as well? Like 5 tubes welded into the same node?

RE: Trimming Tubes

Mandalores- I used only three sketches (we had 3 types of tube in the spaceframe), and put them in reference part, using copy>paste special to part and then changing the support to the midpoint of tube centerline (also in reference part) for extrusion... It all gets imported in the tube part automatically (and is automatically updated if anything is changed in the reference part).

As for multi tube nodes, up to a certain number of tubes, one can extrude up to surface of tubes that have already been placed (when prompted to choose surface, one can right click on the placeholder and create surface join to create one surface). At one point CATIA might refuse to create joints, so one extrudes to surface that can be created and then subtracts the rest of tubes*).

* of course, then one also have to remove lump that was left inside removed tube

RE: Trimming Tubes

go to start, mech design, structure design and look there if there is an end condition or a trim command present there...

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources