File properties and Sheet metal

Hi All,
I have been trying to find a way to populate my drawing
template with the following set-up. When I have a sheetmetal part with
fasteners it is an assembly, this way you can have a BOM for all of
the fasteners (by excluding the part file from the BOM you have just
the fasteners). I am trying to avoid having one drawing for just the
sheetmetal part and another drawing for the sheetmetal part with the
fasteners. The problem is, in an assembly you don't have a Material
type and thickness property that is linked to the actual part. How do
others deal with this type of situation?

 

we always create assy for sheetmetal whether pems are used or not. why, if
at a later time pems are needed you won't loose any in-context features when
forming a new assembly.

create drawing for assy only.
in part, change "configuration properties" (part number displayed when used
in a bill of materials) to
SHEET STOCK

Then in part, file, properties, description we add the following to get both
thickness and material dynamically
"Thickness@" THK, ""

insert BOM into drawing, you will get something like this
P/N DESCRIPTION
SHEET STOCK .048 THK, 304 SS

 

I don't create every sheetmetal part as an assembly, but I do use the
other tip Kenneth mentioned. It's easy enough to have notes reference
custom properties from the part instead of the assembly. Also,
instead of using the Thickness@, which
requires you to either pick the custom property manually, or to type
the name of the sldprt file manually, you can just have all the custom
properties of a given page reference the part/assy in a given view.
That means that if you have views of the part on a sheet, you can just
change (or keep) your sheet setup such that all properties are driven
by the part in that particular view. By default it's the first view
on a sheet, but that's easily modified. One last thing idea is to
create matching custom properties in the assembly that are linked via
equations to the part properties. That would require no change to the
drawing template/notes. This assumes you can do string_prop2 =
string_prop1 in SW. Happy SW'ing.