I know why I'm so frustrated

[arusho]

Most of the designs I do I "pick up" from others and continue there work. Well, I finally realized that 95% of the people I work with are clueless on how to use the program correctly - i.e. for something simple like a basic heat sink:. It is .125 thick and has various holes, fillets, and its not "square" it has a few 90 degree turns. Well for some reason most of the people here think that they start by making a "flat block extrusion" with no features, then they "cut away" the block and add many, many features (fillets, chamfers, etc...). And they keep adding and adding until there feature tree is a mess of fillets, chamfers, planes, empty sketches, etc... mixed in. They all think that they cannot modify a fillet, so they just had 10 more that are all exactly the same size with no thought of later modification. This makes it VERY difficult for me to modify. What I have been doing lately is creating a sketch on the face, projecting as much geometry as I can, and then scrap there part and make a new, clean sketch with all features in the sketch, that way, I can easily see what I want to modify. The tree shrinks from 55 features, to ONE, Inside that ONE is a detailed, fully constrained sketch and is simple to modify...

Design intent is very very important!!

Anybody else have this frustration?

[ReMark]

Sounds like it's time to have a "lunch and learn" to go over some of the basics and set some standards. Maybe follow up with some one-on-one mentoring for those with a special flair for turning the straightforward into the circuitous. Be the hand that guides. If they don't "get it" be the hand that slaps them upside the head. Figuratively speaking of course. I'm not advocating taking a black rubber hose to their noggins to knock some sense into them.

[Julie@Integra]

......Be the hand that guides. If they don't "get it" be the hand that slaps them upside the head...
Ahhh, I needed that chuckle. :)

Sounds like GREAT advice to me. I couldn't have said it better myself, ReMark.

They just may thank you later, arusho, for giving them a better understanding of the PROPER way to use the program, and to detail/design.

[JD Mather]

My impression is that only about 10% of users have a clue how to model a robust part.

You might have them start by reading this document
http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/AU2007/MA105-1L%20Mather.pdf

[Aardvark]

All the time!

By the way Arusho, how are things going in Inventor other than your coworker's poor modeling skills?

[arusho]

Its going better, I'm finding out new things all of the time. But there are many things that make me think "why , why , why?"

I'm trying to get Inventor support up here and I want them stopping by on a regular basis. We have a support contract and I intend to abuse/use it!

[Aardvark]

I feel your pain.

I recently applied for some Solidworks jobs and decided I should refresh my memory of how to use SW. I spent about 8 hrs tinkering with the software and about 4 of those hours were spent banging my head on the wall screaming, "WHY CAN'T YOU DO THIS LIKE INVENTOR!"

[arusho]

I've used SW since 1998 and Inventor since 2005. There are only a few things I miss when I use SW, but when I use Inventor I go crazy...But if and when our reseller will help us, I hope they can answer some questions. But I'm ready to tell the boss to cancel Inventor because of lack of support from our reseller.

[Hickoz_bro]

i hear you loud and clear!

my gripe is with aluminium labels... ours have several holes in them for various switches, lights etc... and of course the text to identify said holes. SOOOO many times i've opened someone elses work and they've started with a sketch showing all possible hole locations for a label (it is a finite number, say 15 or so) and extrude a boss showing all these holes, then they proceed to fill in the holes they don't want (caused due to a sucession of "save copy as" generations of a similar label) then just create the text in a new sketch and feature... so you end up with a part that has 20 or so features 15 of which are likely to be "emboss" they simply don't realise you can edit a feature then just de-select one of the holes... and then do the same for the emboss....

trouble is we have such a high turn over off staff it's rare to edit the drawing of someone who still works there...