I’m reorganizing my weldment profiles and adding in some that were missing, primarily for pipe. I’ve added separate files for each pipe schedule to make it easier to grab the one I want.
I was testing things to make sure the descriptions and such were correct and noticed a problem. I had a weldment part file with 6 different pipe sections, but the cut list on the drawing only showed 5 lines. Two of the cut list items had been combined. Sure enough, SOLIDWORKS had combined a 1/8” SCH 40 pipe with a 1/8” SCH 40S pipe. These two pipe sizes are in fact identical. The 40 and 40S dimensions are the same until you get to 12” and larger. But it would be nice if SOLIDWORKS took into account the weldment profile used for a structural member before combining geometrically identical parts. If this happened on a real cut list I would be forced to turn off the automatic cut list and deal with things manually.
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I’ve never fell upon that situation but it seems weird to me that it combines things that are concidered distinctive in terms of feature. I mean, I understand why it happens, but IMHO it shouldn’t.
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There is definitely a bug in the Weldments body sorting algorithm, and it has been there for years. In some specific circumstances, it fails to recognize that some bodies are/aren’t geometrically the same, even if there are big differences in their geometry. Through testing, I found that this bug appears/disappears based on the order of features, which implies that the sorting algorithm is not just geometry-based, but also feature-based, at least to some degree. Possibly some optimization that wasn’t coded right. I never found a pattern to determine why this happens and how to avoid it though. Reported it to R&D, but it has been about a year I think, and it still hasn’t been fixed, despite how serious this is. I suspect the algorithm might have fundamental flaws and could require a major rework, which is why they don’t want to touch it unless customers raise enough fuss about it. Please create as many SRs through your VAR (unless you are VAR) as you can so that hopefully this gets fixed, because this bug is dangerous as hell.
That indeed is annoying! But when would you include two different SCH in one part? If you have, perhaps adding a decimal number 0.001 to the diameter would help for the different SCH?
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It’s common for us to model existing customer piping systems for interference checks. We also make mock ups of these piping systems for training. The mock ups are typically weldments with cut lists. With 50+ year old nuclear power plant/refinery drawings there can be all sorts of strange pipe sizes. It’s unlikely that this will cause a problem 99% of the time, but now I have to think about the 1% and tell all the other users.
Yeah, that’s a workable kludge. I’ll keep it in my back pocket if it starts to be a real problem.
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