Member postings for Nigel Graham 2

Baz -

Interesting point that. Not necessarily engine parts but certainly items of clear interest that could become useful reality - e.g. simple workshop tools and accessories.

'

David -

Thank you. Ah, that seems odd then. I'd taken the trial version straight from Alibre's (or Mintronics' ? ) site opened by a direct browser link, so I don't know if Alibre or its agent has a register separate from the magazine's.

Thank you for kind offer but given the gamble, I think it wiser to stay with TurboCAD. If I am forced to use only its 2D mode, I'll have to accept the frustration but won't have lost any more than the time already spent.

Even with Alibre's trial version, I'd be faced with a new, totally different, 3D CAD system from scratch. If I can't master that either, I'll have wasted hours on what will last only 6 months anyway. If however Alibre is saying I've have no choice but outright purchase, I'd almost certainly end up losing both many hours and £240.

'

Nicholas -

I can assure you I was trying to work in 3D!

By subtraction though, and co-ordinate arithmetic, as I cannot use the intended assembly methods.

I'd imagined I was cutting the shaft from a billet of steel 2.5" dia for its full length. After a few goes at establishing the right order, I subtracted an annulus from each end of the ' Primitive ' cylinder to leave the end journals. As I wanted, it now looked like a rolling-pin.

Step-by-step and similarly, I removed the " metal " around each crank-pin:

I drew the pin " within " the billet, then copied it in place twice; colouring the copies to guide me. I kept copy 1 as-is, enlarged copy 2 to about 4" dia to cover the throw, then subtracted copy 1 from 2. Finally, subtracted copy 2 with " pin hole " from the billet, to expose the original pin. All correct so far.

It went to rats somewhere after that, including something that changed the shaft from a generated cylinder to a strange, intractable " TC Surface ". I don't know what that is geometrically. Nor if TC there stands for TurboCAD or something else.

This was all in 3D mode, using the various viewing angles to verify progress - until it went wrong.

My later thought about mapping the features' co-ordinates was forced on me by TurboCAD's baffling 3D assembly methods: abstruse combinations of various entity-types, tools, etc. Using such mapping works with straightforward, symmetrical objects, but breaks down with increasing complexity.

Thank you for that Dave - a very comprehensive answer!

CT90 - I'll look out for it.

I do use WD40 sometimes for aluminium, also occasionally for tapping. I'm a bit wary or using too much WD40 or paraffin on a machine-tool because it is very good at washing out lubricants from slides and bearings.

My Myford and Harrison lathes, and the Mill, are equipped to take flood cooling but it may be that by the time enough has accumulated in the chip-tray that you lose as much as you would by just brushing it on.

The milling-machine, equipped with some screens to control the splashing, might the better candidate for a flood coolant system to help clear the chips from the cutter.

On the lathes I might simply get away with a basic gravity arrangement, and placing a tray within the main chip-tray to catch most of what runs off.

==

I occasionally used the lathe in the workshop of a small electronics contracts firm I worked for years ago. (It had to make special enclosures etc. too, for much of its work). This had a large suds tank in its cabinet and sure enough every now and then I'd have to rake off the bacterial mat that formed on the liquid.

When later I worked in the metals store of another company, the hacksawing machine used a different type of soluble oil that was evidently not tasty to micro-organisms, and might even have contained a disinfectant.

Having thought about what others here have said, I tried Alibre's "Free Trial Version" again...

It failed on a "trial period ended" notice. It took me a few minutes to twig this was because I had previously installed it in line with the MEW series.

Mind you, it didn't tell me this until I'd sat patiently waiting for it to set itself up.

Oddly, the programme itself is all there, just switched off; but not the accompanying pdf exercise book. Or if it is, it's in a very obscure folder I have yet to find.

(This exercise models a Hookes' Joint arrangement that if made physically would be a mere "executive toy", though would show why universal joints have to be used in pairs!)

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I had another go at a 3D TurboCAD exercise, a 2-throw crankshaft similar to that for my wagon engine. I tried a subtractive method as potentially feasible.

It looked promising but failed when I tried to change something part-way through. TurboCAD lets you produce simple " Primitive " solids like cylinders directly, but doing anything to them automatically dissolves them into " TC Surfaces " - polygonal prisms of adjacent but independent facets, so the former " solid " cannot be edited. An extruded cylinder from a circle is a TC Surface by default.

Now a crankshaft with disc webs is a chain of symmetrical, simple cylinders of known sizes, so can be assembled by calculating their centre co-ordinates. If the assembly is of more complicated, varied, unsymmetrical elements and sub-assemblies, such calculations become just too difficult.

So just don't expect me to model the rest of the engine around the shaft!

This leads to a particularly disheartening aspect created unwittingly by the CAD manufacturers' web-sites. Understandably they illustrate what their software can be used to produce; but obviously by staff draughts-people using its most advanced techniques to the limit, far beyond anything I could be fairly expected to achieve.

In many cases it is definitely cooling as well as lubricating the cut, but is former function very dependent on the latter?

For screw-cutting and turning small areas I tend to use a stickier lubricant, such as soluble oil used neat, as the cuts are shallow and at usually at moderate speeds. Similarly for parting, normally now from a rear tool-post.

'

The difficulty in actually lubricating and cooling the cutting action tends to be in turning, in long cuts at higher speeds, where the coolant, especially soluble oil, tends to creep along the bar towards, and even onto, the chuck. In doing so it does a little cooling but is otherwise rather ineffective.

I have found the worst spray from a lathe is rarely from the work, but from the chuck.

'

In milling, simply brushing a soluble oil onto a vertical face and the cutter means does not achieve very much as most of it just flows off without washing the swarf away. Soluble oil used neat is one answer though doesn't clear the swarf. Most of the viscous cutting-lubricants I've found are really for low-speed, low-pressure work like tapping and sawing, and anyway just keep the chips in place.

Perhaps then, a pumped coolant system is more important on a milling-machine on a lathe, though delivering enough to wash away the chips even on a conventional machine, means arranging suitable screens to control the spray.

'

The most awkward but sometimes most important for lubricating / cooling, especially cooling, is deep drilling and boring. The only answer is withdrawing the drill frequently to brush the chips off and lubricant on.

Industrial NC machines use special insert-tipped drills with coolant channels down them, for large diameters. This is not feasible in small diameter drills but the principle might work in lathe boring-tool holders down to fairly small sizes.

I appreciate that, and in many cases chip removal is one of the main problems, such as working in deep holes.

I wondered though how much is cooling and how much is lubricating the cutting action, where flushing is less important such as in external turning.

I have not seen anything on this topic anywhere, beyond which materials to cut dry and which to cut wet, but are there any rules-of-thumb, or is largely a matter of trial-and-error for the task in hand?

Thank you. Umm, I had specified conventional, not NC, machines.

You may remember a few years ago some bunch, I think a committee of ££-eyed barristers who presumably would not be affected personally in the least, wanted all privately-owned equipment that could be used to make or modify firearms to be registered.

This was after a man was convicted of re-activating firearms and selling them on the criminal market. So basically, like the model-aircraft people, we'd be officially seen as potentially guilty of future criminal activities unless we can prove otherwise, at our expense and inconvenience.

Luckily that particular piece of stupidity was thrown out, but I would not be surprised if they or some other lot of professional ignorami try the same trick at some time after any similar event.

I seem to remember the proposed registration would have been via the Police, as if they don't have enough real work to do. If someone came snooping round my workshop I would be very tempted to point to a machine-tool or accessory, "Right, do you know what this called and what it's for?" and if they don't, ask, "Well, how can you do your job if you don't understand it?"

Only they'd probably charge me with obstruction or something.

A model-engineering friend said he did have a similar un-nerving experience, when a police officer called to see him after he'd reported an attempted break-in. The officer spotted a milling-cutter, though I doubt she knew that's what it was, and made some silly but very accusatory remark about it being "very sharp".

My friend said he told her quite firmly it would not work if it was blunt, and workshops need sharp tools. She didn't press the point.

Strange how they go after those seen as easy targets... I bet they won't demand registering our computers because they are frightened we might defraud the Stock Market or run a county-lines drug network on them.

Well, I'm not exactly of trophy-winning standard but not a beginner... but this has puzzled me for a while.

Conventional machine tools in our own workshops, not the massive swarf creators now used in industry.

Using pumped or gravity-fed coolant, and not unduly loading the machine, which is better: large flushing rates or a thin trickle / dripping at about the rates typical of manually brushing the suds on?

I recall a professional centre-lathe turner who'd set the suds to mere dripping, yet his work was all of the high standard needed, whether in mild-steel, stainless-steel or aluminium-alloy. Yet his colleagues all used at least thin streams of the soluble oil.

One reason for asking is good practice ideas.

Another, I am considering a simple coolant system centrally-pumped, or portable between machines. I wonder if the Hozelock garden "micro"-irrigation system pipes and fittings would be ideal, with adequate filtering.

Also, with brush or spray, the heat and spinning tend to push the suds uselessly along the bar, slightly ahead of the cutting itself.

'

I once used a simple gravity system using a one-gallon can with a drip-feed tap and hose above my EW 2.5" lathe bolted to a steel bench lacking a proper drain.

My main machines are Myford 7 and Harrison L5 lathes, Myford VMC mill; and when re-commissioned a Denbigh H4 horizontal mill. Brush- or squirt- application would be adequate for the bench-drill, EW lathe and a modern, small Chinese-made lathe .

" Giiiigan " ??

Sorry - Gilligan. With ells not ayes. Now you know why I won't use lap-tops and so-called " smart "- 'phones " !

Michael Giiiigan;

Re Mintronics link etc.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to ignore you.

The whole discussion has become a tangle of different conversations, with notifications appearing in my e-post list randomly, and so I missed your post.

I did indeed find Mintronic's Alibre Atom page, possibly not by quite how you suggested, and I posted a direct quote from it as it might help others. It announces a new version and prices to come, plus possibly one-day courses. Prices with VAT and rounded, £240 alone; £360 with support.

At least I thought I'd posted it but I can't see it. I might have become logged out of the whole site without my realising it.

I'd also commented that whilst I understood others' suggestion I change from TurboCAD to Alibre, I don't know if the [.tcw] drawings I'd want would be transferable to Alibre; and the combined cost of Alibre + the abandoned TurboCAD, makes the change an expensive gamble. A gamble because I can produce rather rough but workable 2D drawings in TurboCAD and leave its optional 3D side as useful if I could learn it, but Alibre jumps right in at the 3D deep end with no guarantee I can learn that either.

Kiwi Bloke 1 -

Manual machines and software "behind" commercial rivals: "A bad thing"? No, not necessarily at all.

If the machine or software does what you need it to do in a manner satisfactory to you, the age of its concept or reality are not important. And many of us have no real choice anyway, when pecuniousness alloweth not even a small NC machining-centre.

Really, much of the development in modern engineering tools and methods is concerned with increasing commercial production efficiency as much as improving the products physically. As was thus 100 years ago, too.

Of course we can adopt modernity in our home workshops. Many model engineers now use CAD to form machine-controlling files, either to purchase cut profiles, or indeed for their own CNC machine-tools.

There have been letter-exchanges on the philosophy in ME (I don't if they've also appeared in MEW), but I see reductions to artificial "purity" by personal taste miss the essential point of a creative hobby. I regard us as making things for the joy of making and usually too, using, them; and that includes acquiring the skills to achieve the aim. Whether you choose or need to use manual drawing and old machines, somewhere in between, or all-CAD/CAM, each route requires considerable skills of its own.

You impress by, say, cutting your own gears for a miniature traction-engine, but unless you are after the big-name trophies, few would seriously object if you copy modern manufacturers by buying appropriate stock gears and machining the bores and keyways to suit. For a "non-model", e.g, workshop equipment, or miniature-railway passenger-truck, it is entirely appropriate to use modern methods, fittings etc. you would not use or could not disguise on that traction-engine.

My own machine-tools are all conventional and Imperial, though I am fitting a DRO set to the mill, readily enabling both mm and inch work. By completing one axis at a time it's already helping make the brackets for the next axis!

[Imperial machines... Fine, but SIX tpi on two of the leadscrews, 8tpi on the third, on my Denbigh H-series horizontal mill? Anyone any ideas why?]

On drawing methods, manual drawing may be very satisfying intrinsically, but CAD's potential is the time invested in learning it, ultimately releasing more precious leisure-hours to turn the design idea into reality - whether on antique machine-tools, or modern CNC versions.

I made first, a " Figure-of-8 Descender ", a friction-brake for abseiling. It is a fig-8 shaped aluminium plate with all edges rounded, and a fairly narrow waist. In use you reeve the rope through the large eye and round the device's waist, then clip the small eye to your harness. It has long been obsolete for caving and industrial / arboricultural rope access techniques but still used for charity abseils and the like. I keep mine out of sentiment.

A fellow caving and model-engineering friend gave me the blank band-sawn from 3/4" aluminium-alloy plate; I bored out the two eyes on a large lathe* our model-engineering club owned at the time, in a rented workshop. Then filed and emery-strip polished the profiles. Took hours!

I used quite a bit for a few years, before replacing it as techniques developed.

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A battery-case to be worn on a belt (miner's lamp style), out of thin steel sheet, holding 4 large cylindrical Ni-Cad cells. I made the case ends semi-circular both to conform to the cells and so it was less likely to catch on rough cave walls in narrow passages. The headset was second-hand to me but made from what I later found was an ex-Admiralty torch.

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Replacing the Fig-8 descender, as methods improved, a simple " bobbin " type descender. In this the rope passes in a crossed pattern, round two pulley-like but non-rotating bobbins between two aluminium-alloy sheet side-plates.

Luckily I spotted its fatal design flaw before proving the point.... I'd missed the point that the top end should be bent over the bobbin to prevent the rope coming off the side and turning the braked abseil into a free-fall. I scrapped it and bought a commercially-made one with that guard built in.

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An acetylene lamp. A curious effect of developing modern caving techniques was the return for a decade or so to acetylene lighting, because the only alternatives available then were ex-mining lamps. They used corrosive liquid electrolyte that could leak in the harsher conditions of a cave, and attack plastic-fibre ropes and harnesses.

So a sheet brass generator, waist-hung on a belt, with plastic hose to the jet and reflector on a clip on the front of the helmet. I added extras not on the commercial versions, included a dished top so the water reservoir could be refilled easily from a thin film trickling down a cave wall.

These were superseded by the commercial development of powerful headlamps using l.e.d. luminaries and small alkaline or rechargeable cells. These are similar to, though more rugged than, the ones some cyclists use for dazzling other road users...

I have seen a commercially-available acetylene caving lamp generator and jest used in model-engineering to give the particular, large model appropriate lighting. The builder concealed the plastic modern generator in a sheet-metal facsimile of the 19C original.

[For those unfamiliar with this, water is dripped through a controlling needle-valve onto calcium carbide in a vessel sealed except for its outlet. The two react to produce acetylene which flows unimpeded to the lamp jet, though its pressure exerts a slight regulating effect on the water. The by-product is quicklime slaked by the water.]

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* The large lathe... was an IXL-badged, fully-fitted, Erhlich, 6" x I think 30" or even 36" BGSC with powered cross and long feeds, T-slotted saddle and comprehensive accessory set. I owned it for many years after we lost the workshop, then donated it to the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway for its maintenance workshop. I like to think, indeed trust, whether still there or in other caring hands, it's still in use.

Dave-

I am intrigued - why does FreeCAD show that programme code at the bottom of the screen? Is it something to do with creating NC control files?

I once saw something like your example, at work, but its equivalent pocket had 1mm corner radii and was on a ledge deep inside an object resembling inside, the interior of a die-cast stepped pulley. Not sure how the draughtsman thought it would be milled - I don't think you can obtain 2mm slot-drills 100mm long!

Andrew _ I am not denigrating 3D drawing, and certainly not its users; and I would find it very useful IF I could learn it; but I feel I am being told my 2D-first approach is wrong without being told why.

Neil - I know the method you describe, and I do use it, but I've discovered further developing the drawing can change the object's properties, and introduce other difficulties for which I can find no rational explanation.

I used the example of the bush not because it would take me all night to draw the thing, but because it would have taken me an inordinate time to have learnt the steps you describe. Maybe not for that simple thing, but certainly for anything more sophisticated, such as the bearing housing and all the bits around it. The difficulty is that I've none of the prior CAD knowledge the software publishers and their manual-writers assume you have.

Jason - what did you draw that in? It doesn't look like TurboCAD, at least not the version I use. As it happens I can draw it similarly in TC, but nothing much more complicated in 3D, because I can't learn how to do so.

I don't accept this "mindset" phrase. It just happens to be natural to me that engineering drawings are in 2D for workshop use, though I accept and would use 3D ones as very useful for assembly-drawings and to clarify complicated shapes. If I could, and indeed had wanted when I bought the wretched software.

Nor do I accept your somewhat off remark about computers and I. I tried that Mintronics site again with the same result, and since most web-site links do work from here (except embedded e-mail addresses) it could be tripped by a security software quirk. Or, possibly, some mis-match if Mintronics use MS-WIN10 and my PC is on WIN 7 Pro?

Never mind which projection to use. I'm beginning to feel I should give up on CAD entirely, delete TurboCAD from the PC, as I did with Alibre and Fusion, sell the A3 printer I'd bought for the purpose, and refresh my manual drawing skills. I still have my drawing-board....

Milton Fluid and probably the denture-tablets mentioned above are just very dilute, simple bleach (calcium hypochlorite)! Same as water-purifying tablets.

Magnets: my " Magnets, 'Fridge & gen. Purpose ", are from scrapped hard-drives, and are quite powerful.

The pumps that come with liquid soaps are very good for decanting small amounts of liquids from full 5l cans of the type designed to throw the liquid everywhere if simply tipped. (Those typically used for wood preservatives, etc.)

Scrapped IT equipment is a handy source of precision steel bars (in printers), circlips, thin-gauge sheet-steel, self-tapping screws....

For cleaning my Myford 7's chip tray, an old paint-brush with a child's toy plastic beach spade, short-handled, has proven ideal. A long-handled equivalent with a steel blade (that dates it!) is there for anything from rooting swarf out of corners, to planting small shrubs and clearing the visiting cats' offerings from the lawn - and yes I do clean it after the latter, by digging a patch of bare earth!

A small irritation, I found the bed under my Harrison's L5 head and tail stocks would fill with filthy swarf. I cut two simple covers longitudinally from off-cuts of ordinary (60mm?) plastic rainwater-pipe, to slide under the shears.

Extra protection for the armoured cables on the Machine-DRO read-out sets: the plug and the sensor won't go through ordinary flexible PVC electrical conduit, but the sensor does pass through a similar tubing about 30mm dia, made for caravan plumbing. It's surprising what useful materials come from unexpected places like caravan-site shops!

Old plastic bank or association-membership cards: cut off embossed areas, and the rest is useful shim material. Some at least are also a suitable thickness for a mid-gap range, non-magnetic feeler-gauge for setting the magnetic-sensor gap on the above-mentioned DRO.

Workshop calculator or similar, or your 'phone? Keep it clean in a polythene, e.g., freezer, bag.

Slide-way cover: The original cross-slide way cover from my second-hand Myford VMC mill having long departed hence, I have replaced it with one cut from surplus garden-pond liner. I don't know how long it will last but it's holding up so far. The upper clamping strip was lost too so I used a length of thin aluminium-alloy angle, which also creates a narrow shelf in which a few holes of various sizes hold small items like the drill-chuck key and wobbler.

Nicholas:

Prices:

I looked at Alibre's web-site. No price given, but it does refer to hobby users, though no direct sales in this country. Instead it directs you to its UK agent, Mintronics.

Mintronics' site is clearly aimed at industry and does not mention cost or private-buyers. Now, the Alibre Atom 3 ad in ME, is from Mintronics; but selecting the Atom 3 name on the agents' site deleted the link. So, I was unable to ascertain the price, but now wonder if Mintronics really does sell Alibre to hobby users directly, or only via further agents, as it did with MEW? And if so, by single-cost or expensive subscription?

'

What of Fusion?

Its site originally revealed clearly, free issue to hobby and student use, with obvious protection conditions. (It had an ulterior motive of course.) Several months later, the same offer was noticeably more discreet.

So I looked again, just now: still "free" for educators and students, but the cagey text hints the licence is short-term for possibly stripped-down software.

'

Other software is turning to costly subscription models - WinZip and Adobe's pdf-converter are immediate examples - and it would not surprise me if Alibre and Fusion, if not also TurboCAD, follow suit.

I can see you find it natural to draw something in 3D because it is a 3D object, but I rarely have much difficulty seeing a 2D representation of it.

Maybe it's what we are used to, but no-one yet has really explained why necessarily-orthogonal workshop drawings have to me made from a pictorial original. Especially as the 3D relies heavily on extruded 2D figures.

Instead, they all say what they prefer, have been taught, or what the CAD publishers intend.

I see 3D CAD's advantages for very complex shapes or assemblies, for the expert; but I still do not know why it is intrinsically wrong to bypass the process.

'

For example, a simple hollow cylinder like a bearing bush.

In 2D (any method) it's two concentric circles and a rectangle.

In manual isometric it is 3 or 4 plotted ellipses and two lines.

In CAD isometric, the computer plots one of several complicated forms: umpteen-sided polygons of individual facets that result from extruding circles, stock "primitive" cylinders modified to size, a solid cylinder subtracted from another... All with specific properties and reactions to further operations; no offered clue which to select. You are assumed to understand it from the start.

By the time I've drawn it in 3D I could have drawn it in 2D and (if I'd managed to print it), made it!

'

Experts naturally find hard things easy; and assume it is easy for anyone. How and why? Why is my approach, my natural and only option, wrong?

Thank you Jason, for the move. I admit it was rather hogging things. The Tea-room would need a Carnforth-size urn and whole collection of Rachmaninov!

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Thank you Dave for the clarification.

Thank you too for your compliment - but I was always a slow learner in anything, up to random levels I cannot exceed.

I've just sent the geological article and its 3 TC-drawn diagrams for peer-review, so some good's come of it! One is a simple 2D cross-section. The other two are 3D extruded sections, coloured even; but might be printed in grey-scale at the editor's judgement.

My other 3D TurboCAD efforts are all engineering-related, but not useable. Most are pure exercises but include an unfinished design for an (x, y, angle) jig-table for the bench-drill, of far wider range but lower profile than those cross-vices.

'

I take your point about a new start, but I stayed with TurboCAD not just by price. Alibre is so different I thought it illogical to start all over again after managing to overcome TC sufficiently to produce fairly simple, if rather rough, orthographic drawings I can use.

Also, Alibre looked no easier than TurboCAD despite its support article in MEW; though it seemed friendlier than Fusion, which I'd tried cold and without any support.

Andrew Johnston:

Your point and its sample drawing didn't appear until I'd posted the above.

I wonder though, and have thought this of other contributors who swear by what I see as the long way round ... did you start learning engineering-drawing with isometric-first CAD?

If so, I understand how you'd visualise your designs that way.

I didn't, so have no problems with orthographic drawings and maps. Further, I see viewing a solid item one face at a time as just as natural as seeing it in 3D. We do that all the time, knowing the sides recede from view somewhere even if we can't see them. Viewed across the room, my long-case clock is obviously 3D because I see it at an angle; but face-on, the crowded shelves of books form a two-, not three-, dimensional image.

Consequently, is needing a 3D model to ensure components fit together without fouling others, an instinctive result of being taught to work what I think the long and hard way round? You can still assess fits etc. in orthographic drawings. It's correct shapes and dimensions that matter, not views!

Converting a 3D model to the necessary 2D workshop drawings means advanced knowledge of your particular brand of software. It's probably there in TurboCAD but like forming 3D assemblies, hidden. I can't speak for Fusion, Alibre etc but TC's maze of solid-generation types and snap methods, co-ordinate systems and work-plane types, all of different properties; makes 3D assembly-drawing a baffling mass of unspecified combinations of which only one will work in each situation.

So it's really a matter of how you've been taught, or have taught yourself, technical drawing. If you have been introduced to 3D CAD by someone who can explain it properly, or can learn this extremely difficult subject yourself, and right from the start, then I can understand you'd work that way.

If you are used to seeing 3D items in 2D, you have not missed much if you cannot learn 3D modelling. It is disappointing intellectually to spend hours on the challenge only to find it impossible; but it's not essential to putting on paper a design whose physical reality will fit together and work as intended.

You can't though, work backwards, turning a multi-part orthographic drawing into an isometric assembly. CAD is not designed that way.

Edited By JasonB on 04/06/2019 16:07:51

Thank you - some interesting points there.

I'll explain the Why etc:

My primary but not sole project is a 4"-scale steam-wagon built only from a few surviving trade reviews and their photographs, so entailing a lot of designing, trial and error, unforeseeable problems and so on. From peripheral contact with CAD at work, and its increasing use in Model Engineer, I realised if I could understand it to a reasonable level its advantages potentially mean it being very useful to me.

'

The advantages I saw even before trying it for myself were in:

1 Generating the drawing's elements (geometrical figures) rapidly and accurately,

2 Ready editing - e.g. to alter diameters or fastenings.

3 Ready copying of one element as where necessary, thus avoiding having to draw each individually.

4 Automatic dimension calculating, with the ease of working in 'thous' rather than vulgar fractions, to suit the machine-tools. Or indeed, in millimetres, though at the time all my machines used real inches. I didn't yet know dimensioning can be fraught with its own difficulties.

Additionally, I knew 3D drawing (I didn't yet know is called " modelling " would allow the three first above, plus

5 Ready viewing of the subject from all sides

6 Building assemblies to verify e.g. clearances, mounting-points, pipe-runs, controls.

I even thought one day I could be rid of the massive A0 drawing-board dominating my dining-room!

I am familiar with manual drawing, but I realised CAD introduces a vastly greater set of its own skills between idea and printed drawing.

'

So I did not go into buying TurboCAD blind. My employer's drawing-office uses Solidworks but I gambled on sufficient similarity, and all these packages do essentially the same things for my more modest home-workshop needs, even if their controls and tools differ markedly.

I knew it would be a lot to learn; but not how hard it is.

'

Of points raised by others:

Age? I don't see that as a problem, assuming undiminished memory and mental capacity. Ability to learn is what counts. A friend gained a PhD in a geological subject as a retirement hobby - I had the pleasure of participating in many of his field-work expeditions to Norway. Yes, he is far brighter and more able to learn than me, but he's also a decade older than me and I am not aiming even for a degree.

'

Need? All right perhaps want more than need, for a hobby, but I saw CAD as a potentially valuable adjunct, or tool, to my hobby's real aim - creating real things.

'

View of CAD, as SillyOldDuffer describes? None of us are mind-readers! Apart from my preferring you talk to than about me when discussing how I think, I don't agree with your analysis anyway. For: -

I formed and retain a clear idea of wants, as above.

I knew you need think of CAD very differently from manual draughting.

I knew I don't need CAM files or brochure-quality pictures; though careful colouring can clarify an assembly-drawing: even 19C draughtsmen used tints and textures.

I realised 3D modelling manipulates objects, but they are still pictorial representations of geometrical figures, so that does not " blow my fuse ", thank you! I find it easy to see them as isometric even if they are not strictly so.

I don't think TurboCAD allows animation, but that does not worry me.

'

My real problem is the lack of any clear, printed literature on a) CAD concepts generally, and b) specific to the individual make of CAD. I started using computers, at work, at about the change from MS-DOS to MS WIN3, learnt some very basic BASIC, and have used 'Word' and 'Excel' extensively since, both professionally as a lab assistant, and supporting my hobbies of model-engineering, caving and geology. I wrote a book mss. on an Amstrad PCW. So though I find advanced software difficult to learn, I am no novice! However, all those were backed by genuine manuals. CAD is not: its publishers rely on formal teaching (unavailable to me) and videos (available but not helpful).

I did help myself greatly though, by indexing TurboCAD's God-awful pdf " manual " properly. I discovered that very unusually for a pdf file, I could copy its contents page and via 'Word', form a 2-column 'Excel' version sorted alphabetically. So I can use its print to select the page in the still-on-line original, which you can't search by words.

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Finally, on unwanted icons, I did not know the thing was there until after posting, and there seems no way on this forum to edit a posted comment.

Edited By JasonB on 04/06/2019 16:07:33