(2021-02-18, 3:30)N. W. Perry Wrote: Try inserting the node again, and be sure you have selected one of the end parts of the hose with the little red and blue arrows before pressing Insert. I was able to reproduce your problem by clicking on the middle of the hose (the "path skin") and inserting that; but you need to insert a "path point" which is the gadget with the arrows. (You should be able to select the whole end handle of the hose, which will include the arrows, as long as you don't have grouping disabled.)
By the way, "nested" mode means that you can work inside of sub-models from within the main model—you don't have to open up the sub-model separately to manipulate it. A flexible hose in LDCad is really a little sub-model, and if you click on it in normal mode, you select the entire hose and can move it around. But if you click on it in nested mode, you are able to select the different parts of the hose (control points, end caps, path skin etc.) and just affect those. So you can re-shape the hose without moving the whole thing around.
And yes, you're right—there will always (?) be a non-flexible version of any flexible part in the LDraw library. These are mainly useful for displaying in parts inventories, such as in instructions, but they are almost never useful in models because you almost always want the flexible part to, well, flex. :-)
When you are ready to export back to Studio, there are some threads here already about how to do that. The main thing is that you have to save the flexible part that you made in LDCad as a .dat file (not .ldr) that Studio will recognize as a part. But like you say, we'll get there in time!
Oh my goodness. Thank you so much!! That worked! Still plenty of things I don't understand (sometimes when I click the end and click insert, it just creates another end part! But not always!) but I have got it looking like what I want it to look like!
So how do I now save it as a .dat?
