[R-390] 390/390a gear train

[bw]

> To add to what BW has said...I'm not a production pro but I don't think it
> is as easy as just dumping a CAD drawing into a CAM machine and out pops new
> gears and what not.  My brother is in that business with Volvo...I'll pick
> his brain on that part.
> 
> To document and display the gear train I think it's a good idea for the
> printed page but not as good as one might expect for a computer screen
> displayed version of the gear train because of the proprietary nature of
> most of the programs that generate output.  You pretty much have to own a
> copy of the software used to generate the graphics to display the graphics.
> Most of these programs are expensive.
> 
> We have the same problem in the workplace.  Our engineers use AutoCAD.
> Problem is the guys that use the drawings in the field can't display them
> without having a version of AutoCAD on their laptops...too expensive and not
> intuitive at all.  We like Visio in the field because it's easy and fairly
> cheap to distribute to 100 folks.  The engineers don't like it because it
> won't do what they like to do.  We went to another product...can't remember
> what it was....but it would allow you to view an Acad file but you couldn't
> make any changes....so much for field modified "as built" drawings.  Then
> that company quit supporting the product.  It's a nightmare...and none of
> that even touches manufacturing....it gets deeper as I understand it!
> 
> Cecil....



Actually, it is worse than that. Most of these packages rely on .DXF files
for interchange. But, these aren't always compatible. Then, there are
various DXF formats brought about over time. More compatibility issue here.
Well, I say that they rely on DXF. Maybe it has changed in the past few
years.

Autocad isn't very intuitive and never was. The whole CAD scene is a mish
mash of features. Some of the best aren't numerically accurate for
measurements. Those that are lack other vital modeling tools. For instance,
Alias Sketch by Alias Research is a top name program. Alias was the leader
in video modeling some years back and I bought it because I had plans to
start my own video company for southern Alabama. If you could do Alias
modeling, you were hired pretty much on the spot. My main gripe about Alias
Sketch is that it wouldn't mirror objects. For instance, if you designed a
right wing for an airplane you couldn't mirror it for the left wing....at
least not easily if at all. I guess I could have copied the right wing
coordinates and entered negative signs to each coordinate but that would
have been a nightmare. Anyway, that is an example of a fine program with
fundamental problems like most of them.

Sketch was orphaned a few years after I bought it. It still runs just fine
on new operating systems so I can still run it.


Barry