I hope you have been following this series; I have got some good feedback from it. If you haven’t been following the series please look back through the posts for the title “Best Practices Series 1”. If you have been following, thanks for the support and feedback.
Welcome to Best Practices Series 2, in this session I will continue with the topic of Components. I hope that you will find these four Best Practices very useful in your every day designs.
Delete Components Not Blocks
One of the most difficult habits I find users fighting to overcome on a daily basis is deleting blocks. From our first issue in the series we discussed thinking of Electrical symbols as Components. By thinking of symbols more as components it will help us to remember to use the tools provided to manipulate these components. For example I would want to Delete Components instead of Erasing Blocks. What I mean by this is use the AutoCAD Electrical “Delete Component” command instead of reverting back to the AutoCAD Erase command. This is a very difficult habit to break because of most of our background in AutoCAD. Let’s face it we have been using AutoCAD Erase for years; it will be a hard habit to break. Listed below are a couple of benefits of Deleting Components instead of wires.
Delete Component Benefits:
- Automatically Heals Wires
- Updates the Scratch Database
- Updates any required cross references
- Automatically re-locates existing wire numbers
Move Components Not Blocks
Classically in AutoCAD a designer would use the “Move” command then select the block to move, and then select a base point, then a new location point. In AutoCAD Electrical a user can simply right click over a component and choose “Move Component” then select the new location for the component. This takes out a couple of the steps to say the least. Listed below are a few more of the benefits of moving components.
Move Components Benefits:
- Automatically Heals Wires
- Automatically Trims New Wire
- Automatically Prompts for Retag
- Automatically Re-Locates Existing Wire Numbers
Multiple Insert Component Not Array
Back in the day, the array command was one of the best tools when having to create a set of duplicated blocks or geometry in AutoCAD and it still is today. However AutoCAD Electrical has a “Multiple Insert Component” command that will allow you to create a crossing selection across wires that you want to insert a component onto.
Multiple Insert Component Benefits:
- Insert multiple intelligent symbols at once
- Have the ability to show edit dialog after each insert (allows user to give different information for each component)
- Have the ability to skip components on rungs in the selection set (can’t be done with an array)
- Automatically Tags each component properly.
- Automatically trims wires accordingly.
Aligning Components
This is truly one of my favorite commands in AutoCAD Electrical. I remember taking old designs and copying them forward only to end up removing quite a bit of content. This would typically leave the components staggered from rung to rung. Man was it a pain to align them back up so everything looked nice and neat again. AutoCAD Electrical has an Align Wire command that makes this task painless.
AutoCAD Workflow:
- Create a construction line through the insertion point of the first component.
- Move or stretch each remaining component from insertion point perpendicular to the construction line.
- Repeat for each component to be aligned.
AutoCAD Electrical Workflow:
- Right Click on component and select Align.
- Select components to follow that alignment.
In the next issue of Best Practices I will discuss Ladder Tools, their not just for climbing any more……
