Quote:
Originally Posted by robokiller
for my questions:
1. how has 80/20 worked for you in the past? what profiles have you used?
2. whats the best way to CAD it, We use inventor and my work uses sketchup and Autocad with AutoQuoterX, but when I use step files from 80/20 Inventor forces me to go through fusion to get the length I want.
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1. Is a pretty open ended question. There's no straightforward answer other then 'usually pretty well'. The teams that use it consistently tend to love it and do well with it, probably because they've learned techniques and tricks to make it work well. There are dozens of threads and whitepapers on the topic- just search for 80/20.
2. When I need to CAD up a 80/20 frame I'll use either Inventor or Solidworks weldment environment to generate the extrusions in whatever length I need using a 3d sketch as a template. At this point I have the profiles saved and ready to go, but I generated them by just starting a sketch on the end of a model I found online, projected the outline of the 80/20 file and saved the sketch as a weldment profile. I think the example profiles I used were right from the 80/20 website. It was pretty straightforward to do a couple years ago, I can't imagine much has changed.
What I'll more commonly do is just use a profile for a 1x1 or whatever square tube for the profile, rather then the specific 80/20 profile. This greatly cuts down on the filesize and memory requirements, and rarely sacrifices any functionality of the model. This only works when your not concerned about the physical properties of the model, like mass, CG, FEA stuff etc.