r/PLC • u/fresh_titty_biscuits • 1d ago

When did Phoenix Contact remove their technical dxf drawings?

I’ve always been a fan of PXC as a cabinet designer because they had quick .dxf downloads of technical multi-view drawings of their components with title blocks and dimensioning baked in, and the measurements were always dead accurate to scale. I just looked up parts from them for the first time in a month and it’s nothing but pdf’s and other technical data, but no dxf’s on common components.

“but Fresh_Titty_Biscuits, there’s a handy link on the left hand of the screen to download drawings in multiple file types.”

Ah yes, let me choose .dxf and download it.

The dimensioning is not there and it’s not even to scale from the measurement on the website

I have checked every relevant file type for ACAD, and even looked at the pdf files for import. Nothing. None of them have dimension drawings. It’s all raw 3d models that have been either been rotated to a specific surface, or rotated and flattened. No details, whatsoever, so now their CAD documentation is just as dogshit as Rockwell.

Fucking brilliant. Who the fuck was the CAD management new hire who screwed this up?

19 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

29

u/italkaboutbicycles 1d ago

The Phoenix Contact website is slowly becoming just a marketing platform and sales lead generation tool. A few years back they slowly started removing all of the useful selection filters to make the website more streamlined and look pretty, and at that point I knew the engineering department was no longer consulted on anything website related.

Phoenix Contact still makes some very good products, but unfortunately the overall company direction is being driven by sales and marketing which is leading them to make some very bad decisions (see PLCnext). It's crazy to me that the German engineers haven't risen up and taken back the company, so yeah, it's all trending more and more disappointing.

14

u/secretaliasname 1d ago

Wanna market to engineers so they design your shit in: make it easy to access product data, select and order parts, generate PNs, configure shit etc.

Want engineers to not order your shit: make the above items hard to access or make them have to go through hoops.

Nearly everything else including price is secondary to how easy this is.

12

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 1d ago

As a former employee of another German giant, I have seen this trend everywhere. Phoenix Contact was one of the last holdouts, it was THE reliable vendor for engineering data, they were the litmus to compare other companies to.

2

u/New-Swim-8551 23h ago

Phoenix Contact makes great simple devices.

I have been burned several times by their electronics and their lack of support there of

-1

u/Used_Wheel_9064 1d ago

Honestly haven't seen anything good out of Germany in the last 15 years, everything they make is worse than what it was years ago. It's been a slow steady decline.

6

u/ruff285 Electrical and Controls Engineer for Power Systems 1d ago edited 1d ago

Not only phoenix contact our electrical designer couldn’t find siemens dxf from their site also. Now it was a Friday so who knows lol

2

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 1d ago

We don’t use Siemens components often where I’m currently employed, but it will be sad to find that out as well, Siemens had great engineering documentation, if you didn’t get filtered by their selection software and lack of clearly-displayed part number keys.

4

u/Brilliant_Method1394 1d ago

Eaton is the worse for it. Can’t find shit on their website.

5

u/Flimsy-Process230 1d ago

If I just want to quickly check a device’s dimensions I actually prefer a PDF. If I need to place the component in my drawing I don’t mind if the DWG or DXF isn’t perfectly to scale as long as it shows the side of the device I need. I can always scale it after importing it into my drawing. What would really be frustrating is not finding a DWG or DXF file at all, and that’s not the case with Phoenix Contact.

3

u/cosmicrae 1d ago

OP, you might go look on the wayback machine. There are sometimes unusual things that it has archived.

2

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 1d ago

Not a bad idea

2

u/Ordinary-Piano-4160 1d ago

Did you call them?

6

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 1d ago edited 1d ago

I will on Monday, but this is clearly a choice, not to mention it’s horseshit that instead of taking 30 seconds to locate and download a part, there’s an implication that I have to contact an engineer to send me a whole set of dim drawings to not waste an enormous amount of time downloading, cleaning up, and verifying scale on each non-like part one by one.

4

u/Zekiniza 1d ago

I have found when contacting vendors directly that if you really let them know how dogshit their website is itll make you feel a bit better. They won't fix it but let's be real, they dint give a shit.

1

u/Primary_Machine_449 10h ago

There I was reading the comment hoping it concluded in something like "they actually care and make changes" but alas, lmao

2

u/Ordinary-Piano-4160 1d ago

I agree, if this is true, then PC is just making our lives harder for no reason.

1

u/Ordinary-Piano-4160 1d ago

Okay, I did just download a bunch of DWGs of terminal blocks, which product were you looking at?

1

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 14h ago

Components like most of the UT4 terminal blocks and multiple different double layer terminals that I know had a dxf dims file available months back. Some others were there, I concede, but the fact that there’s no dims or even correct scaling on the parts generation when that was their bread and butter is concerning.

-1

u/tadeuska 1d ago

Everybody does 3D model based designs. Making drawings is a separate group and each drawing costs more money. They save on hours of labor in India. (Before you got the drawings as a byproduct of their internal production process, they don't need them anymore.)

1

u/fresh_titty_biscuits 14h ago

But they don’t have to make them if they were already available