9fingers wrote:I surprised myself by getting the brass part right almost first time once I got my head round the radius tool which does not tell you the radius you are drawing but the offset from a straight line instead grr.
The Arc tool shows, by default, the bulge (height of the arc above the end points) and you can enter that number if you know it. You can also draw the arc with a specific radius if you like by typing the value followed by r. So if you wanted a 25mm radius arc and you're working with units set to mm, start the arc in the usual way and then type 25r followed by the Enter key.
9fingers wrote:Whilst the exercises to date have shown me about aligning edges and corners etc. I am struggling to align the centers of cylindrical parts. I found the offset tool for ensuring concentricity between circles when forming a component but aligning my roller bearing on its stud seems to elude me.
As Robert mentioned before, you can use inferencing to locate the center of a circle. He mentioned a washed but the same would work for a cylinder as well. Hover (or is it hoover?
) over a vertex on the edge of the circle for 2 seconds. Then move the cursor toward the center of the circle. when you get close, the cursor will snap to the center and you should get a little pop up message. Click to grab the cylinder by that point and start moving it.
You can move that point to the center of another cylinder by hover over a vertex on the edge of the destination cylinder for 2 seconds then moving the cursor toward the center of that cylinder. If you switch the face style to X-ray, you'll find it's easier to do this move. If you have difficulty stiil, put crossing guidelines on the destination cylinder to locate the center. Then you can move the first cylinder to that intersection.
9fingers wrote:I tried to draw a cross hair on the stud before push and pulling it to try making a cylinder with cross hairs all the way through like a stick of rock but the cross hairs stayed resolutely on one face.
I'm not sure what a "stick of rock" is. Must be a British thing. The cross airs you drew on the first face aren't anything for Push/Pull to operate on--it only operates on faces. You could use Move to move the cross hair lines to the opposite end but my guess is, witha little practice, you won't need them anyway.