Need some serious help with Autocad Functions

Ok guys, I am less than 24 hours new to Autocad, so all the technical or menu items, etc I will probably have no idea where they are or what you are talking about. So I will need detailed baby steps if you can help me. I'm sure its a rather simple issue to correct the problem I am having.

Here is a brief synopsis. I am in the process of building a homebuilt plane. The plans come with a coordinate grid to draw up your airfoil so you can make a pattern to cut your wing ribs and then off of this pattern, modified slightly, make your forming blocks to shape your wing rib blanks. Having absolutely no experience with Autocad, I went ahead and installed it and jumped right in. Here's what I have and here is my latest issue.

I have successfully drawn to the proper measurements the nose rib. For the outside shape cooridnates, I used first a line in the very front of the nose (because it wouldn't bend sharp enought when the entire curve was created using polyline) then I used a poly line after this first coordinate to lay out the rest of the two outside curves. Then I right clicked on each polyline and select the "fit curve" (I believe that is how it was phrased) option which smoothed out the straight lines very impressively. Over the course later, I have proceeded to "trim" and add tooling hole locations and lightning hole locations and outside trimmed areas. Well, the last two steps I need to do are make a concentric line .050" inward of the outside curve lines to account for skin thickness and rib flange thickness. Then from that line make a concentric line .5" outward to create my flange on the rib. Well, somewhere along the way, what was once a continuous curved polyline has turned into nothing more than a bunch of 1 inch segments when I try to select it. I can select little segments but do nothing other than drag it into little archs. When I try to do a perpendicular line off of the curve to get proper inward and outward measurement, Autocad tells me its an invalid selection.

Is there anything you can suggest that I have done and what would my corrective action be to proceed. Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance for it and the "dumbing down" you do to explain it. Haha.

-Jon

Welcome to CADTutor.

Quite an ambitious undertaking for your first one.

You might try using the UNDO command, to back up to the point before you messed it up.

If you have not SAVED it since you went astray, should be able to get it back.

If you find that does not work, then you could create a copy of what you are working with, and try using

the PEDIT (for polyline edit) command.

After you start the command, enter M for MULTIPLE, then select all of the lines which you hope

to JOIN, which is one of the commandline options you will encounter at the commandline,

after creating your selection set. Accept the default fuzz factor of 0, and hopefully

you will be back in the game.

The creation of those concentric lines will be done with the OFFSET command.

Follow the commandline prompts, and go slowly.

You might want to try to post the dwg, not sure if you can as a newbie, or not, but

worth a try. If you can post it, most likely somebody can help you sort it out.

Here is a copy of the dwg I have thus far. Thanks for the reply and the look.

Sonerai Airfoil Nose Rib.dwg

Here you go, I created a copy which is the lower image in the drawing, and used PEDIT,

as previously described. No problem, worked like a charm.

You are back in the game.

I checked your Z values and everything is nice and flat, which is nice to see.

You might want to keep a copy with a different name, as insurance, in case you have another such mishap.

Don't EXPLODE your drawing, or your plane, once you get it built.

Sonerai Airfoil Nose Rib 2.dwg

Thanks for the help. I was up all night last night (litterally) just to draw that. It kept doing wierd stuff. I'd like to learn it and be more proficient with Autocad, maybe one day. Now I just have to do the main rib too. But I've received so good pointers. One last question for you though. I have a local printing company that has a plotter to print this but they need it in a .pdf. When I do the print to .pdf format will it preserve precisely the measurements or does it distort it a bit? Also, is there a way that I can have say my page (i.e. 36 x 48) and layout the drawing exactly where I want it on that square? Possibly make multiple copies of the image to put on the space rather than using all that paper for just one image? I guess what I am getting at is, if I have my picture in front of me like it is with the little x.y coordinate there, how do I define where exactly on the screen I want my print area?

There is still much to learn young Jedi.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that you start here.