How to change units from inches to mm

OK, I have a drawing that needs to have the inch units changed to metric units.  I have tried to do this, but the drawing goes "wacky".  Has anyone done this successfully?  I read another post that someone had to use FreeCAD to do this but hope not.

So, here is my drawing in inches:



And the result when I change ONLY "Current Drawing Preferences->Units" from Inches->fractional-1/16 to Millimeter->decimal-0.0


Hope the images come through.

Thanks

LC currently has no concept about units. In this sense, a line from (0,0) to (1,0) can mean 1mm or 1 inch.

In past, we recommended to do this type of unit change by scaling, so scale (0,0) - (1,0) to (0,0) - (25.4,0) from inch to mm.

Now, there's a "general Factor" in Edit->Current Drawing Preferences->Dimensions, allowing all dimensions to be translated from inches to mms by using a general factor of 25.4. This way, all drawings are still in inch numbers, but dimensions are in mm.

frede wrote

OK, I have a drawing that needs to have the inch units changed to metric units.  I have tried to do this, but the drawing goes "wacky".  Has anyone done this successfully?  I read another post that someone had to use FreeCAD to do this but hope not.

So, here is my drawing in inches:



And the result when I change ONLY "Current Drawing Preferences->Units" from Inches->fractional-1/16 to Millimeter->decimal-0.0


Hope the images come through.

Thanks

OK, so does that mean that one should only have to change the "General Factor" to 25.4 to now show the Dimensions to 25.4 and those will now be in millimeters?

I tried that and it looks pretty close.  

That depends on what you aim to do with your drawing. In drawing units the length of the line is still 1.0, but the dimension value shows 25.4. For printing you have to use a appropriate factor too, matching the drawing units, not the dimension units. For printing only, this might be OK.

Also the line thickness is influenced by this. I think thats the reason for the thick black lines in your screen shot. To avoid this you have to change units and scale the drawing.

If you want to use the drawing with a CAM system for CNC machining, you probably must scale the drawing too, that the line is 25.4 drawing units with a General Factor of 1. That depends on the features and units of the CAM system.

Armin