Paste Into Sketch Not Working Properly

MotorcycleWriter

I have a complex sketch I'm working on. Well, complex for me, as this is my first attempt at CAD. I'm already an aerospace engineer so this will be easy for me to learn, right? :-/ I have new respect for mechanical design. It is listed in the public documents as "Motorcycle Headlight Frame." 

One of the sketches is the outline of the frame, the other sketch is the holes. Ultimately I need to extrude the frame and leave the holes as holes. The dimensioning lines were starting to get in the way of selecting axes so I broke the sketch up into two. I figured I'd just merge the sketches into one when I was done since that's an obvious feature for a CAD package to have. Turns out I know less about CAD than I thought, which isn't surprising because I knew nothing and assumption is the mother of all...

So, I found the copy/paste feature. I watched several tutorials on this: you copy the sketch and then select paste into sketch. However, when I do this, the pasted sketch is misaligned. It shows the transform tool, which I'm assuming can be used to align the sketches, but it isn't working as shown in the tutorials either. The videos are all a year or so old so the workflow may have changed since then.

I'm using a Mac with Safari but that shouldn't matter since all the computing is being done in a server farm somewhere and my fancy computer is just acting as a terminal.

Any advice on what I'm doing wrong?

brucebartlett

It is probably not that easy to copy a sketch and try to merge as you have described as after the copy you will have to reattach references and you will be back to the having a sketch that is is hard to manage. I don't see a problem in Onshape with having separate sketches to make an extrude, just make sure that when you do the extrude you don't select the entire sketch but select the enclosed regions which can be made up of multiple sketches, body or even surface geometry. Having lines set to construction (dashed and can't be used for features) will also help and the golden rule is to make everything black so you know it's fully defined by dimensions and constraints.

However, with practice, you will probably find ways to manage more complex sketches. 

MotorcycleWriter

Actually the tutorials are very clear but the program simply doesn't behave as the tutorials show. So I found the workarounds. It just doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the product.

mthiesmeyer

Hi MotorcycleWriter,

Could you point me in the direction of the tutorials that aren't matching the product please? We would like to fix that as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Mike