Curved Aluminium Tubes Help Please.......

[Mike_Hall]

i have a visual to do and i am struggling with creating a stand.

The stand has 3 shelves on with curved aluminium 15mm tubing helding them in place.

the curved tubes cross each other top and bottom

They are 2200mm high and 15 dia thick.

I can't seem to grasp the sweep tool to do this action. When i do create one using a locus it just shows up a 2d line.

Can someone explain how to do this please?

I have attached a Technical drawing of how the stand should look

Thanks

Mike

[mike m oz]

Try Extrude Along Path:

- Draw an arc for your path in an elevation view, and then convert this polygon to a Nurbs curve.

- Draw your profile and give it a fill.

- Select the profile and the Nurbs curve path and Extrude Along Path.

Once you have one pipe you can duplicate it to create the others. Even better would be to convert it to a Symbol so if you need to change it you can do all instances with one edit.

[Mike_Hall]

i have just tried this,

I created the arch and convert to NURBS, then drew a circle filled it.

Then selected both object and clicked sweep, but it say locked or illegal

Can you elaborate

[Guest]

Why are you attempting to sweet it once you've created the extrude along path?

You should only need to duplicate and mirror the objects so they are facing the right direction.

[propstuff]

As Mike says;

you want the Extrude along Path command, not Sweep.

You could use a Sweep (called a Lathe or Revolve in some programs), using a circle profile and a locus to define the centre of the arc, but the extrude along path is easier to use and edit.

PS The Tech note part of the forum is not the best place for queries like this. General or 3D Modeling would get more eyes looking at it.