117 — Pipe & Conduit Penetration

Every building needs pipe, conduit and duct through its walls. ConstructiVision has no “Penetration” button, and that is not an omission: a penetration is a blockout with Shape set to Circle, cut all the way through the panel.

Tutorial 103 introduces the dialog. Tutorial 116 is the same dialog configured the other way — stopping short of the back face.

Note

This lesson is AutoCAD-only. ConstructiVision on the web has no equivalent today — the browser page for this lesson explains why, so you are not left hunting for a feature that is not there.

Where it is

Recess and Blockout Details. Six rows are visible; the dialog holds thirty, across five page tabs (1-6, 7-12, 13-18, 19-24, 25-30). Each row is one penetration.

The row

field	what it is	worked value on AAA039
Enable	turns the row on	ticked
Shape	Circle — a pipe opening is round	Circle
Measure From	which side Distance is measured from	L
Distance	along the panel, to the centre of a circle	12'-0"
Elevation	up the panel, to the centre of a circle	8'-0"
Radius	half the opening’s diameter	4"
Thickness	all the way through the panel: it reads the panel’s own thickness, with Full ticked	7 1/4", Full

With Shape on Circle, Width and Height are greyed out: a circle is sized by its Radius. Leave Radius at 0 and the opening still draws, at 1’-0” by 1’-0”.

On AAA039 the row above draws a round opening labelled D = 8”. Its elevation markers read 7’-8” BO and 8’-4” BO, and the dimension chain along the bottom reads 11’-8”, 8” and 15’-8” across the 28’-0” panel: an 8” circle centred 12’-0” across and 8’-0” up.

Recess, pocket, penetration — one dialog, three depths

This is the useful idea, and it saves hunting the menu for features that are not there:

you want	what changes
Recess	thickness less than the panel
Beam pocket	thickness less than the panel, Z Offset 0
Blockout	thickness through the panel
Penetration	thickness through the panel, Shape: Circle

The tool is the same. What changes is how deep it cuts and what shape it cuts. A reader who learns this once stops looking for four separate commands.

The vocabulary index carries the full mapping from trade words to the product’s own.

Watch the lesson

The video cuts the round penetration from The row through AAA039 and reads its label and markers.

Note

This lesson still carries no count of how often real jobs use penetrations: no trustworthy count has been measured across the sample panels yet.