lost lamb, basic help needed to draw a brick wall

[wkitty42]

ok, i don't know where to start... i'm rather frustrated and apologize in advance for that but i've looked at tutorial after tutorial after tutorial... i really really hate today's video tutorial mess that everyone seems to think is the best thing since sliced bread but i have tried and tried to go through them... i'm 50+ years old and much prefer written documentation with pictures to match... back in the day i taught myself programming by reading numerous books and using a lot of hiliter on important steps and pages... i taught myself autocad (v2 i think) and easily had 2D floor plans laid out in a matter of hours... most all of the tutorials are out of date or are missing steps... either that or i just don't know what i'm doing any more while trying to watch the vids and hitting pause every 10 seconds to try to hunt down this clicky thing and that box over there...

here i am now, after two days of stumbling around, still trying to figure out how to draw a simple keystone block and then use that block to draw a wall by replicating it... all the stuff i've tried to follow is doing things that are a lot harder (eg: angle iron out of two extruded boxes that are subtracted from each other)... the wall i need to draw is already built... i just need to record an "as built" drawing for my records... a face drawing standing on the ground looking at the wall (x&z??) will work but i probably should maybe also have an overhead view (x&y??) because of a slight angle on one end and a bit of a curve on the other... can someone please help me figure out how to draw this thing so i can get on with the rest of my project?

ADVthanksANCE and my apologies for the bit of a rant above...

OS: Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.16.6707 (Git)
Build type: None
Branch: releases/FreeCAD-0-16
Hash: 5465bc47c95db45e0be85dc0e2872419efadce0f
Python version: 2.7.6
Qt version: 4.8.6
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 6.8.0.oce-0.17

[Willem]

If you take time to learn a young fellow like you ( compared to me ) will see that FreeCad is amazing software. You do not have the time now and need only a simple 2D drawing, probably to hand over. With some knowledge of autocad I think the best advice to you is to use Librecad instead of FreeCad for this task

Your first request is to start with a 3D brick and you want to built a wall like you did 40 years ago with Lego. That is also possible. I did it this way:
- Create a box in the part workbench and give it the right dimensions
- Give this box a fillet, also in the part workbench
- Repeat this for a half size block
- Make simple copys of these elements in the pulldown menu of the part workbench and renamed them to Brick001 and Halfbrick001
-These copies can be brought in the right position for the start of the wall
- Make Arrays in the draft workbench to built a complete wall

The normal way of making a wall is to draw a line and make a wall of it in the arch workbench. This type of wall has no individual bricks

[wkitty42]

thank you for the information... you've given me some ideas to work with and i've finally had some time without external pressures (when mama isn't happy, no one is happy, if you know what i mean) to work with freecad... i actually made it through the engine block tutorial even though it isn't related to this fairly simple thing i need to do... it did kinda help me to figure out this alien-to-me desktops thing, though... we didn't have that stuff when i played with autocad all those years ago in the mid to late '80s on Sanyo machines with Hercules graphics cards running DOS 2.11 IIRC

i like your idea of making arrays of the blocks... to be able to do that i want to create a 3D block like those this wall is made of... these blocks are 18"w x 12"d x 8"h so the visible face is 18" w x 8" h... the top view of the block is not a rectangle, though... it is 18" w for the visible face but the buried back surface is only 16" w... i cannot figure out how to take a 2 point rectangle, or a 4 side polygon, or a cube and trim the one face down by two inches... if i could do this and use this object in the offset arrays (each course of block), it would be great... here's an image i was able to find of the blocks... i don't really it done for me but explained how... i've even imported the pic into a project but haven't had any/much luck even tracing it using dlines or even just lines... if i were able to do that, i doubt that the dimensions would be accurate

Compac_II-Triplane_bp.jpg (25.49 KiB) Viewed 2628 times

another other thing that concerns me is if i'll be able to bend those arrays around some (beizer?) curves... i don't know if the arch desktop allows for this or not as i haven't been able to get that far yet... the wall, itself, is 155 feet long... 3 blocks make the first curve which starts 9.5 blocks from the end... then it is perfectly straight for some 80 feet or so before making another slight curve... here's a rough drawing of the top down view... again, i want to know how so i can catch my own fish

IMG_20170122_052359-1.jpg (77.33 KiB) Viewed 2628 times

there are step-ups on both the top and bottom of the wall as it is on a bit of an incline... i'm trying to figure out how to be able to do them and can only see that there will be several sets of arrays, mostly for the common middle portion of the block courses and others to be the steps... i think... if i could only find some decent graph paper and my french curves, i would probably already have this done by manually drawing it out if not for the project being an hour away and me needing measurements that i cannot get from pictures... measurements which will just tumble out of this drawing if i can get it done with the right dimensions...

BTW: no, this isn't to be turned in anywhere... this is to be put in my files for my records of the project and how the crew completed the project... there's certainly no grade score or $$$ on this drawing i'm trying to get done...

thanks again for your help

[Willem]

Hi, it is not a problem to make a 3D brick with the help of the image.
- Import the image in the image workbench.
- In the sketcher draw a rectangle 18" x 12" and a rectangle on the image.
- Calculate the scale, close the sketcher and change pixelsize of the image in the tree
- In the sketcher draw the brick
- In the part design workbench Pad the sketch with 12"
- The rest is a copy of the workflow in my previous drawing

[wkitty42]

i think i'm back for a little more after a few hours sleep... it has been a while since i pulled a 24 hour session fighting with these one eyed beasts we've come to find everywhere in our lives these days

i'm with you up to the point of padding the sketch by 12"... not sure why or what that does... i gotta go back and redo my drawing again so i can extrude it to 8" tall correctly... i've gotta be missing something

using the arrays is very cool... i have had a play or two with your sample... i'm still not sure if or how i can bend them to fit on a curve, though... can someone explain that for me or offer another way to handle that part of the project, please? my head is still kinda cloudy after only four hours of sleep...

[chrisb]

In the Draft Workbench you have Draft PathArray (from menu or as icon) for positioning the copies along a path. Read the documentation about it: https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.p ... _PathArray

[bejant]

In the Draft Workbench you have Draft PathArray

I had that same thought, so I started with Willem's file and changed it a little to add the cores but I can't get the PathArray oriented correctly.

20170122a-PathArray.png (31.07 KiB) Viewed 2583 times

20170122b-Wall-1.fcstd

(653.26 KiB) Downloaded 25 times

(^^^I haven't tried this using 0.17, and my Sketch001 should have been through the widest part of the block)

OS: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Word size of OS: 32-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 32-bit
Version: 0.16.6707 (Git)
Build type: None
Branch: releases/FreeCAD-0-16
Hash: 5465bc47c95db45e0be85dc0e2872419efadce0f
Python version: 2.7.12
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 6.8.0.oce-0.17