Kubotek Forum

Fasteners and mechanical elements are LONG overdue for cleanup.

 First, a bug:  If you create a fastener as a fastener object, and your display is wireframe with silhouette lines, you get silhouette lines on the head (in the case of a socket cap screw) but not on the shank.  If you then burst it to a simple solid, the missing silhouette lines appear.

So:  Create a fastener [object].  It has a name, and you can verify it, and the tooltip tells me it's a HEXAGON SOCKET HEAD CAP SCREW, 1/4 - 20 UNC 3A x 1.  That's nice, but the information isn't otherwise accessible without custom programming via kxl (GetFastenerData), and Kubotek support for kxl is, well, don't get me started, other than to say PLEASE update the kxl documentation!.

Enhancement:  Add an option to automaticallly put the information into the entity properties (part number and description) so it can be used in a BOM.  This leads to a rant about why "UNC 3A" needs to be in there, yes, it's correct, but nobody puts that information in a BOM for standard fasteners... but that's no biggie as one can edit the .csv files.  Which leads to...

Request:  Kubotek, please provide some documentation on the database .csv files for those of us who want to change them (not that they can't be figured out for the most part).  But please put something in the release notes each release about which (if any) of the user editable files (the .csv files, autolabel.dat, etc.) have changed in content or format.  And/or maybe an installer thing "do you want to use your modified files from the old version?" as you do for other customizations.

Enhancement:  Make it possible to modify a fastener object (e.g. change a 1-4-20 x 1 into a 1/4-20 x 1 1/2) through the generic edit dialog.  Then there would actually be a reason for making it as a fastener object.

Now on to mechanical elements, in this case angle beams.  Only a programmer would place a piece of angle by its center which is in space somewhere.  An engineer will want to locate it by a point on the faces, usually the corner.  The same applies for the other shapes, the anchor point should be the center of the web or corner for channels, the center or corner of the web for I-beams, etc.  So enhancement, make the insertion point more logical, and another enhancement, please make it default to the last used size, the same as fasteners do.