Understanding connectivity

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BRAD HENDRICKS: In this course, we

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will focus on connectors and their connectivity.

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This is part of Item Creation for Fabrication

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and the next step in Connectors.

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Let's look at understanding the connectivity

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a little better in the connector that we have created.

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Let's go and edit the connector.

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Go to the Drawing button in the toolbar.

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The first thing we're going to do

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is I'm going to move this connector to a group

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for the Evans system.

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Going to right-click on the connector, Change Group,

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and in the dropdown, going to move it

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to the rest of the Evans connectors.

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The next thing I'm going to do is version it up.

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I'm going to Right-click, Owner Information,

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Version it to 1, and then type in the version.

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These are the two fields we're going to go over--

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Connectivity and End Type.

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Why did we set this to Orbital and why did we

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set this to None?

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Let's look into this.

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Now, the first thing we have to understand

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is what are we connecting to?

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And we're going to connect it to some stainless steel pipe

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tubing that is also an orbital weld.

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Let's look at our tubing.

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The tubing connector is under our Welded category, Orbital

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Weld, with a Connectivity of Orbital

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and the End Type is None.

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The reason we have the End Type set to None

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is we need to have the orbital weld end

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to be able to connect to itself.

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Let me show you.

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If we put in a 1/2-inch piece of tubing and we need some more

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length, it has to be able to connect to itself with

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a orbital weld right here.

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Going back into the connector, the End Type being None--

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if we were to set it as male, it would look for a female.

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If you set it to None, it can also connect to itself, none.

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Another example.

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Let's look at this carbon steel piece of pipe.

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Its connector has a Connectivity group of Welded

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and the End Type is Male.

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So when you go to attach something

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to the end of this pipe, the first thing it looks at

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is the Connectivity group.

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Then after that, it goes to the End Type

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and sees that it is Male.

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The next thing that gets put in, it's

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going to look for a female end.

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So if I go put in another piece of pipe that

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also has a male end, it's going to go through your service

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until it finds a Connectivity group of Welded

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and then a end type of Female.

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And that's our weld.

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So when you put in a piece of pipe,

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it will automatically find the female part,

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put it in, and then place your piece of pipe.

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The difference with the orbital piece

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is we don't have a welded gap.

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We need them just to butt up together.

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Therefore, we set them both to none.

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There is another way this could have been done.

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We could have made an orbital weld with a length of 0

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so the pipe still butts together.

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The problems we've seen with that

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is when systems have to be moved in a model,

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often, all these zero-length connectors

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get left around all over your model.

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This is a cleaner way.

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And if you need to account for the weld,

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you can add the orbital weld as an ancillary,

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and use an ancillary report to see

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how many welds you'll be doing.

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When we place our elbow with the new connector,

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it's going to look at the Connectivity group

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first, then the End Type.

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And if it's a match, it'll place your item.

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Our final step in creating the connector is to do some QC.

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I'll show you how I do this in EST. I go to my Items folder,

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and I go to the elbow where we created the connector.

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I'm going to Control-Shift-Right-click

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and take off all product sizes.

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It throws all the sizes in the model.

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Now what I'm going to do is I'm going

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to measure my insertion depth to make sure I've got it right.

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Here's a couple important things to consider.

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When you're checking the length, if you have the snap to element

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or you just turn them all on, you

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can snap to non-connection points.

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If we turn them off and we do our measurement,

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we're not connecting to lines that aren't connection points.

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And you can tell the connection point

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by the circle with the asterisk in the middle.

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So once we have our connection point,

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then we can turn our snap to element and get the end.

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And we see that this is 0.8.

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And we look at our PDF, and that is 0.8.

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And we're going to want to do that to every size.

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Now we can compare our dimension to each size.

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We can see that every size is exactly our insertion depth

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compared to the PDF.

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Let's check the rest of the dimensions of our connector.

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Remember I pulled, from the SAT files, the body

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thickness and the flair.

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So let's get those measurements.

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We can compare them to the SAT files that we pulled.

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And when they all match, our connector is complete.