Rotating Families and Making Wall Units

[the_cad_monkey]

Hello, I have created some fans for a company but I cannot figure out a couple of things. I drew a wall mount unit, but when I put in the project, it can only be ceiling or floor mounted. How can I change it to a wall mount? Also, I have some Inline Fans that come in at the wrong orientation. Can I modify that? Thanks in advance for helping a newbie.

[Ian Matthews]

I think that if you want to make a wall based piece of equipment then you need to start with a wall based family template such as 'Metric Generic Model wall based.rft'.

[the_cad_monkey]

Thanks. I was afraid that was the answer. I was hoping there was a checkbox somewhere that I overlooked that would turn it into a wall based unit. How do you rotate items such as an inline fan? They might be vertical or horizontal. I can rotate it around a vertical axis but not a horizontal axis. Anyway, I guess I will redraw the part. It is not to bad since I can copy it and not loose the dimensions for the 20 sizes I have.

[Ian Matthews]

If you can't rotate using a horizontal axis it sounds like you're using 2008 (which, IMHO, should never have been let out of the box). If you upgrade to 2009 then you can access objects in elevation and section which will then let you rotate the fan to run vertically.

[the_cad_monkey]

Thanks. I just had to switch views in order to rotate it the way I wanted. Is there any way to change the orientation of the part itself so that when it comes in it is horizontal by default. I should have drawn it in the horizontal position. I have used this software for about 30 hours. It is not made for 3D modeling such as Inventor, but it gets the job done for simplified parts.

[Ian Matthews]

I should have drawn it in the horizontal position

Yep, it'll arrive in your model in whatever orientation it was drawn within the family.

Before you actually left click to position the piece of equipment, you can hit the space bar any number of times to rotate it through 90 degrees around a vertical axis (anticlockwise), but I don't think there's an option to rotate it around a horizontal one.

[the_cad_monkey]

Thanks Ian. I did not know about the spacebar trick. I just got done redrawing it. Thanks for your help.