This post (Staggered weld bead on a diameter ) covers everything that I am doing, except for one tiny detail . . . Setting the location of the weld beads.
Jim Sculley provided the answer for the original question, and I'm hoping he might have an idea for this.
(Using a clock as a reference for the weld locations)
In the image above, you can see that the first weld starts at "noon" and goes clockwise.
I am working with a part that only has 2 welds (one on top & one on bottom)
It starts at the same "noon" location and goes clockwise as well.
I would like to have the top weld centered on "noon", and the bottom weld centered on 6.
It is very easy to adjust the starting point of the weld, and having them at 3 & 9 is a piece of cake -
But you have to go all the way around the dial to get back to 12 & 6, and then this happens -
It "stops" where the weld technically "starts" - at high noon.
I guess my question is this - How do I get the other half of the weld bead up top?
Worst case scenario, I use my "dirty workaround" of 2 welds
(the one shown above with a partial top weld, and another weld that goes from noon to 1:30ish.)
I would really like to get away from the dirty workarounds . . .
thanks!
t
You can use a Move/Copy bodies to rotate the weld bead bodies to where you want them. How's that for a dirty workaround?
Or, maybe try fiddling with the Intermittent Weld settings along with the From To. If you do some tests with a round piece with a diameter that is a whole number divided by pi, it's a little easier to work with. Here's a shaft with a diameter of 2/pi:
So, knowing that the total weld length is the diameter D * pi and D is 2/pi, the weld length (circumference) is therefore a nice value of 2. So, say we want two beads that each take up 1/4 of the circumference. Each bead is then 0.5" long. To evenly space them, the pitch should be 1. With the start point at zero, we get this:
If we want to move the beads counterclockwise by 45 degrees so that they are centered on noon and six, we need to increase the start point to 0.25, since 360 divided by 45 is 8 and 2 divided by 8 is 0.25:
Note that SOLIDWORKS automatically adjusted the weld length to subtract the offset.
If you don't want the gaps and welds to be the same size, you need to modify the 'Weld length' under the Intermittent settings. Say we only want a 3/8" long bead. If we only decrease the weld length we get this:
We are now out of position, so we need to increase the start by half the value by which we decreased the weld length:
And you can keep doing this as long as you want:
Taking pi out of the equation makes it easier to see how the various parameters affect each other.