Welded Assembly Help

Here's my situation:

We design and build Kiosks. Our sales department designs "dummy"
models in solidworks and then exports it to get rendered for the
client to approve, and that usually works out fine. The models are
fully solid, only surface details, etc.

When it comes to actually building the unit though, we've been unsure
how to proceed. The shop used to use Autocad and it would take a week
to update any kind of details for the shop drawings. About a year ago,
they decided to "get with the times" and get a solid modeller.
Solidworks (basic version) was what was chosen at the time (pro-e is
still a little pricey, and the designer had bad experiences with
Inventor). Having a solid model driving the drawings would make
updating a breeze, or so we thought.

When it comes time to actually model a unit though, it seems to be
more complicated than we anticipated. They are made of wood primarily
(plywood, etc), with metal accessories (handles, slides, hinges, etc).
Our first project was done as an assembly, with each panel of wood a
seperate part, but the assembly started to get overly complicated
REALLY quickly. Our project folders were immense, for what seemed like
a simple product. For our drawings, we typically have to show a fully
assemebled unit, cross sections, indicating the panel ID's to
reference a cut-list. Sometimes drawer front or something would be
shown individually. As an assembly, it wasn't too hard to put together
the required assemblies to insert into our drawing package, but the
actual design time was much longer than intended.

We then tried doing a welded assembly. This greatly sped up design
time, not having to name each part individually, deal with mates, etc.
We could model a whole unit in a day or two. But then came the tricky
part: doing the drawings. Cross sections were 'ok' (semmed a little
slow to work with though). But when it came time to show only a few of
the solid bodies as a seperate "assembly" in the drawing package, were
we unsure of the best way to seperate that from the original welded
assembly. We originally selected the individual bodies, then selected
'insert into new part', and while thats fine as-is, we often found
ourselves wanting to add or remove a body from that 'export' we just
did, so as to still stay parametric to the original welded assembly,
but we couldn';t accomplish this without deleting it and basiacally
starting over; losing all the work we had done in the drawing. We also
considered configurations, but that ended up being terribly slow,
seeming like it loaded thw whole assembly each time we wanted to do a
view, and it ended up taking 30+ seconds to switch pages in our
drawing package.

Basically we're at a loss, everything seems too slow and clunky to
work like we would want to. Our computers are by no means slow, 2 gigs
of ram, dual core intel bla bla..

Does anyone else have experience building and detailing assemblies of
this sort? what would you suggest? How would you go about building it
from the ground up? welded assembly? plain old assembly modeling?
configurations? etc? Anything suggestion that could help speed this
process up would help, and our VAR doesn't seem to be much help. If
you work with large assemblies, what tricks do you use to keep your
software running smoothly? opening a drawing package right now takes
ages, let along switching pages, it's getting quite irritating.

I had previously used solidworks in a machine shop for years and had
honestly no complaints, since i really wasn't working with large
assemblies, i was mostly dealing with sometimes complex, single models
to be machined on CNC, quite a different world i tell ya!

Thanks!

André Richard
The idiot that suggested Solidworks.

 

When creating detail views of individual bodies in the drawing use the
Relative View button, don't create parts from the bodies. Go into your
customize menu and under drawings you should find the button, add it
to your drawing toolbar. It works great unless you're trying to detail
a cylinder shape, it needs two planar surfaces.

 

It works great unless you're trying to detail

2007 added the ability handle cylindrical bodies.

 

Snip
"When it comes time to actually model a unit though, it seems to be
more complicated than we anticipated. They are made of wood primarily
(plywood, etc), with metal accessories (handles, slides, hinges, etc).
Our first project was done as an assembly, with each panel of wood a
seperate part, but the assembly started to get overly complicated
REALLY quickly. Our project folders were immense, for what seemed like
a simple product. For our drawings, we typically have to show a fully
assemebled unit, cross sections, indicating the panel ID's to
reference a cut-list. Sometimes drawer front or something would be
shown individually. As an assembly, it wasn't too hard to put together
the required assemblies to insert into our drawing package, but the
actual design time was much longer than intended."

Snip

"Basically we're at a loss, everything seems too slow and clunky to
work like we would want to. Our computers are by no means slow, 2 gigs
of ram, dual core intel bla bla..

Does anyone else have experience building and detailing assemblies of
this sort? what would you suggest? "


Jack Sanford of Westport Shipyards in the Seattle area gave a presentation
to the Portland SWUG late last year talking about how they used SolidWorks
to do all of the cabinetry on semi-custom 50 meter yachts. If you can get
him to give a presentation to a user group in your area, I'm sure you would
find it most enlightening.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"