SW Routing Orientation of Reducer

[gmarken]

Hello All,
I have been using Routing for a month or so and have found it to be extremely unstable and quite frustrating. I have had routes created that were saved and fit correctly within the top level assy (saved and rebuilt) only to have them corrupted upon opening the top level assy the following day.

In trying to repair one of the route assemblies I need to add a concentric reducer from 2" to 3" pipe but cannot get the reducer to point in the right direction. I need to expand fron 2" to 3" but the fitting will only orient 3" to 2".

Additionally when placing socket weld elbows I use the shift and arrow keys to toggle its angular orientation, however, once the fitting is located and you accept its positioning it would snap to an alternate position, 45 degrees out from where the preview indicated.

When the software works routing can be a great time saver, but I end up wasting time trying to correct corrupted routes. SW also crashes daily. VAR is of little or no help.

I am running SW2007 SP5 on a Dell Precision 490 Intel Xeon @ 2Ghz, 2Gb of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro FX3450 with all the latest and correct drivers.

Can anyone offer any help with the fitting orientation?

 

[josephv]

question:

How are you inserting the reducer? Are you dragging and dropping from the design library?

 

[gmarken]

Yes, with pipe fittings that is the only way I can add a component.

 

[josephv]

If you open the reducer, are all the routing points still there (there have been cases, when due to corruption they are removed)?

 

[gmarken]

The reducer has one routing point and two connection points. I have had elbows that lost one of thier routing points (rp number 1) and in that particular case it was on one of the butt weld elbows that was supplied with the routing package. I added the missing point which became rp number 3 and would you believe that after I saved it and went to use it it was missing routing point 2.

 

[gmarken]

I just opened another route and the pipes have dissapeared. Upon examination, the flanges (created by SolidWorks & supplied with routing) are missing connection points.

 

[josephv]

hi again, are you working locally or via the network?

Not that there is anything wrong with your network, but most file corruption issues we have seen occur via the network.

You may want to work locally (as a test) to see if the corruption issues are network related.

 

[gmarken]

I do work locally now. We have five new seats, so eventually the design library will be on the network. I also added the missing points to the reducer and it now will orient correctly. But why are the routing points and connection points missing?

 

[josephv]

Hi,

Don't know why the points were missing. Was your routing library protected (i.e. read-only)?

Cheers,

 

[gmarken]

No, it is not. I am the only person working with it andd it is on my hard drive. I spoke with tech support at SW (not my VAR) he did not seem surprised when I told him about the missing routing points. By his own admission routing is not very well supported.

 

[josephv]

thanks for the info, you may still want to use read-only on your library just to prevent any corruption (which could be causing the missing routing points) from occurring with your library files.