Section Issues in Drawings

I am having some issues with sectioning views in an assembly drawing:

First: I have designed a set of components that snap together. Every
snap location must be sectioned and dimensioned. The sectioning is
done (but slow as the twentieth section took 12 minutes to compute),
but I am having issues dimensioning. I dimensioned the first two
sections from the top view, but when I tried the third section through
the eigth from the top view I cannot grab any point/lines to dimension
from. Outside of the dimensioning tool when I place the cursor over
the section it will highlight face geometry that is not visible in the
section. This face geometry acts like it is above the section view,
but only becomes visible in outline when I try to select section
geomtry. Details: SW2005 sp0.1 with WinXP SP2. I selected 1:1 scaling
from an original of 1:2, I selected "display only surfaces", and each
section is a "partial section" I also used "exclude components" to
select only the parts that I wanted to section. I did call tech
support, but the person knowledgeable in this aspect was not in.

Second: A similar issue (and probably directly related)is that I have
ghost geometry displaying outside of the section view. Each section
view creates a bounding box that contains the section. I have elements
of the part "ghosting" (not all the geometry, but enough to get an idea
of what the part looks like) outside the bounding box from components
that I told the section to exclude. Wacky.

Third and not completely related: I have cropped some views (and a
couple section views), but I would like to redefine the crop or remove
it. Is this possible? Also, when you crop a view it shows the sketch
that is used in the crop - is there any way to hide this?

Thanks for you help.

Dan S.

 

Hint:

You can get your section speed up by supressing already completed
sections till you are ready to print.

This won't solve all your problems, but it will help you to get to the
other problems quicker.

 

Some of the ghosting may be due to adding additional parts AFTER the
original section was created. If so, see my post in "SWx 2005 SP1.1...

You can edit and remove crops by RMB on the cropped view, you are given both
options in the menu.

Wierd behaviour of sections - I have occassionally noticed that I could not
pick points - but have not found a pattern to this. Tip - NEVER alter the
orientation of the view being sectioned (eg from a front view to a RH view)
as this will totally screw up it's section views - dimensions and notes will
dangle after a rebuild or re-opening the drawing and the only way to fix it
is to delete the section and start again.

Merry

 

This is a good one to keep in mind.

WT

 

Here's an update on how I got around all these isssues:

First, with cropping there is a command for altering/deleting the crop,
but I couldn't find it. Solution: Right click on the cropped view,
hit the "double down" arrow at the bottom of the screen and the crop
tool shows in the tree. I could edit the shape or delete the crop.

Second, the WACKY ghosting is an issue but the workaround was to
slightly modify the section line by pulling one of the ends and then
move the view forcing a rebuild which removed the ghosting.

Third, In regards to the problems dimensioning a view due to invisible
faces blocking the pick I selected the view in the tree then manually
hid (basically redundant because the section view should "hide" them)
every part that got in my way.

Looking forward to putting this design to rest.