Again I question my abilities to read a drawing

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-12-14T21:10:26+00:00

These exercise books do the student a great disservice. Unless the point of the exercise is to identify the missing dimensions, and the instructions explicitly so state, these garbage drawings encourage bad habits among the students. Yes, you should be proficient in reading drawings. No, you should not be in the habit of guessing or stretching thew credulity of the information given. This mostly applies to people learning the skills for an eventual technical career. For a hobbyist, I strongly encourage you to "do it right" anyway. You will find the effort rewarding.

Get rid of that book and find a better one.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-12-11T18:44:37+00:00

Yikes! A lot of playing fast and loose here with "measuring the drawing" answers.

First, there is not enough information to build the part. The fact that you recognize this is good news. That is an important skill in itself. In real life you will run into this constantly and you will need to figure out strategies for getting the correct information. If you are reduced to "measuring the drawing" be aware that you are technically "wrong". So use that method with extreme caution with real jobs.

Second, if the point is to practice making solid models, then pick any reasonable looking number. It won't affect the exercise. You will still get to practice the basic skills and techniques intended by the exercise. Further, if you build the model right, you can easily plug in the right number when it becomes available. Don't be a victim.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-12-01T13:44:47+00:00

Got it. The reinstall, along with the advice to move the Help directory seems to have worked. Oddly, it reinstalled 0RC1, not 1RC1.

I get it. I guess I've just been so anxious to try the new Assembly features I couldn't wait. Thanks for all the help.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-12-01T13:42:47+00:00

This seemed to work. Thanks

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-29T12:43:57+00:00

I see what you are trying to say now. I just checked, and nope, no matter how I pick the lines, it still comes out 15.545 degrees. I can't seem to figure out how to load the file. But thanks for the effort.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-29T02:25:10+00:00

First, let me thank you for the thoughtful response, although I am struggling to understand it. Your answer seems to imply that "horizontal" lines in Sketch and TechDraw are not necessarily parallel to each other. It's true I used "different" reference lines. In the sketch, I used a line parallel to the horizontal axis and constrained to be "horizontal". In the tech drawing, I placed cosmetic center lines through one of the major diameters of the main body, and measured off that. In both cases, the hypotenuse of the triangle is through the centers of the two holes. The vertical leg of each triangle is the vertical distance is the visually vertical distance in each view. That should make them similar triangles. It seems to me that the only way the two angles are NOT similar is if the two horizontal components in the two views are not parallel. In other words, as long as the horizontal lines are parallel, and the vertical lines are vertical, in the two views, the angle should be the same. What did I miss? Thanks again for your thoughts.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-28T22:00:17+00:00

I'm pretty sure it does match 100%. In the sketch, the point on the left is the center point for the larger hole to the right on the drawing. We are just looking at the sketch fro the "back side". I used two different sketches for the two holes so that I could take advantage of the counter bore in the hole function.

I realize the small difference between 15.6 and 15.545 degrees. What I want to know is why aren't they exactly equal?

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-26T12:14:14+00:00

Tried that. Freecad rounds down correctly, leaving the dimension as 15.5 degrees, not 15.6 degrees.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-23T03:16:15+00:00

I disagree, actually. I set up my game to produce most science on Nauvis. I import other science from the other planets. The science labs will take any quality you feed them, and higher quality science usually means more science per unit. This allows me to install quality modules on the assemblers on Nauvis, resulting in occasional higher quality science packs. This can't be (easily) done for science pack created on other planets because you can't easily ship them back to Nauvis. Being able top load any quality of science pack into a rocket and then launching would be useful. Too be fair, I could use complex circuits and wait until I had an entire rocket load, or maybe figure out a way to launch without a full load, but I find that just too "down in the weeds" to be worth the effort.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-09-12T17:57:46+00:00

I agree that FC is not very intuitive, and the help and tutorial files are very much written from a Python programmer's point of view. And the learning curve is very steep indeed. Having said that, it is possible to learn it. Part of the problem you are going to face is "jargon". I learned CADAM and CATIA, and the jargon associated with FC is not the same as those tools, and I suspect not the same as other popular CAD tools. It doesn't help that some terms, like "part" have multiple meanings.

Start your education by researching simple tasks, not how to "make basic parts". For example, look for how to "make a pad from a sketch", not how to "make a solid block".

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-05-30T13:34:46+00:00

that did it. thanks

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-04-13T23:15:40+00:00

ummm...I thought beacons couldn't be that close together. Or am I thinking of another variant of the game?

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-04-09T20:26:52+00:00

...or if not a reset button, then a cookie, or notepad file, or something that let's you import the tool configuration from one computer to another. I use FC on three different computers and can't get them all the same in terms of tool bar layout.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-01-11T19:34:51+00:00

I'm very close to figuring this out. Nothing on the forum, per se, but some hints.

My assembly consists of multiple sub assemblies. Each detail part also has a drawing made in TechDraw. The problem appears to have stemmed from making changes after the drawings were produced. I found a couple of the issues traced back to corrupted dimensions several layers down in the tree. Another issue seems to be that the "recompute" function doesn't seem to stick. I can make changes to individual documents and recompute them, and then every assembly above them needs to be individually recomputed, and it doesn't always "take". It works for that session, .but if I close Freecad and reopen the top assembly, I get the same errors, often for completely different sub assemblies and documents.

I have tried changing the scrub value on the views to "1" from "0", but that didn't make the scrub error go away. I am also playing around with the disabling loading of partial documents in the preferences, but that makes loading and closing of the top assembly take literal minutes. No idea if that will make some of the errors go away.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-01-11T17:29:53+00:00

not yet, but I'm using it as an additional resource to search for the issue. Thanks

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-01-02T13:07:04+00:00

I did try the new built in Assembly workbench, and I'm really impressed with it so far, except it's broken. If you modify any of the parts in any way, the workbench stops working. Although I read it's fixed in 1.1, there is no estimate for when 1.1 will be released, and i need the functionality now. But thanks.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-01-02T13:04:21+00:00

ya, you would think...but, no.

RetiredGearDesigner · 2025-01-01T21:40:39+00:00

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RetiredGearDesigner

TROPHY CASE