ISOGEN and Victaulic pipe in CADWorx Plant Professional

During my free time, I sometimes peruse help files…I know it’s a bad habit, but I can’t stop.   While reading through the skeys.pdf (C:\CADWorx 2010\Plant\Isogen\Isogen_Utils) I ran across a skey that I would have had use for, but was not aware of.  By default if you use a victualic spec, the ISOGEN iso will look something like this:

So, let’s say I want my isometric to look more like victaulic fittings (and less messy on the elbows), what can I do?  The answer from the skeys.pdf is two words (CLVT, ELCL). 

What we will do to make our isometric more correct is overwrite the couplings and elbows with the appropriate identifiers and skeys.  The coupling should have an id (identifier) of CLAMP and an skey of CLVT.

The elbows should be changed to have a Skey of ELCL (the identifier is still ELBOW).

With those settings applied to all the elbows and couplings, our isometric looks like this:

Much cleaner, eh?

One last tip if you aren’t concerned too much about visualizing a clamp.  You can turn AutoWeldGap On (=1), and define a weld with the id=CLAMP skey=CLVT.  Then you would get a “clamp” placed automatically at the elbows.  Off course it still looks like a weld, but your BOM is correct and the appearance of the isometric wouldn’t change.  Using a weld or a coupling comes down to a matter of preference, but at least you have options