Weldment feature review

I just spent several hours at my dealer, evaluating if the weldment
feature would work for us. If I were to adopt SW, I would spend 95% of
my time working in this feature. I thought I would give my
observations here, and see if any others had comments.

The general process is to create a 3d sketch of lines, which
represent some edge or center of the tubing you are going to use.
Then once you start the process, you select the lines you want a
particular profile to be used with. However, all the lines you select
for this operation are locked to the same "pierce point". So, if the
line represents the outside edge of the tubing on one part of the
sketch, but the inside edge on another, you must do them as separate
operations. This is not a big deal, until you go to create a
cut-list. Each individual operation must have its description
manually edited, the description of the profile doesn't come in
automatically.

Actually, I realize there may be more graceful solutions to some of
this, but the manual really doesn't describe the process in any
detail. My dealer's tech guy has had a little training on it, so he
was able to make things work with a little trial and error. But the
lack of info in the manual may make the feature unusable without this
instruction.

The next hassle we ran into was in creating custom profiles. The
list of existing profiles is quite limited. Again, nothing in the
manual and the process is very tricky because there are a number of
special secrets to getting it to work. (You must save as a special
file type, but first highlight the sketch name in the feature tree,
and the directory where you have your profiles must be the correct
number of levels down)

Finally, creating the cut list is quite cumbersome. There are a
zillion pitfalls that even an experienced tech support guy has
problems with it. There are some instructions online, but a novice
can't hope to follow them.

For our purposes, we just accepted the idea that cut-lists are
faster, easier, and more accurately done the old fashoned way (with
pencil and paper). The profiles are only a one-time hassle to create,
and 95% of our work is simple rectangular tubing anyway.

Ultimately, it is still much easier to create weldments inside SW
using this technique than if it were not available. My dealer warned
me that it might take another release before the feature is really
finished. Our company will buy it, because I occasionally have
structures for which I need the engineering data I can extract from
the SW model. But for most of our stuff, vanilla AutoCAD will be the
best choice.

Joe Dunfee

 

Joe,
I use this feature occasionally so I'm no expert. You're right the
information available about this feature is incomplete.
My weldments are no complex so my cutlists are not large. Therefore,
this feature works reasonably well for me. Since Weldments are a new
feature I suspect it will be refined as time goes by. (hopefully)
In regards to making new profiles, I struggled, asked my Var, then,
when no one could give me a reasonable description of how to create a
profile, I opened an existing profile, modified it and "saved as".
You just need to add points where you may want to be able to select
pierce points.
I hope others have more tricks for you.
Mike

 

I had a brief look at it and as You say it doesn't look too funny, what I
remember though was that I was able to both pattern and mirror those
features, tubes, gussets and endcaps.
I struggeled a bit with the cut lengths but gave up due to lack of time. I
had rather high expectations on this one coz I do lot of frameworks with
both rectangular and square tubes, maybe I have to wait a little (a version
or two) befor I start using it then. The old way with config tubes and an
assy might be better of for a while yet.

Krister

Smiley <> skrev i
diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet:
....

 

I have been using weldments extensively since the Pre-Releases and my VAR
created a macro that converted all of my Australian BHP steel sections and
pipes into the library features required for weldments. If the initial set
up and conversion is done thoroughly then each section size will contain all
of the custom properties to automatically complete the Weldment Cutlist. I
would have posted these library features to our local SW user group website
for free dowload, but the process used to create them has made the entire
library over 1GB (about 250 MB when zipped) - my VAR is having another look
at the macro to see if it can be modified to overcome this growth in file
size.

You should note that you will need to add a number of additional points to
weldment sketches to allow the profile to be located better (e.g. a circle
will need a at least a point at each quadrant, plus centre point).

You can also create standard library features for items such as cleats,
baseplates, lifting lugs, etc; however, any custom properties will not be
added to the cut list. You will also find that plate items (gussets, etc.)
will have zero custom properties when you create it's cut list item - these
will have to be added individually.

Note that 3D sketches have some limitiations over normal sketches (you
cannot add a mid point relationship, equal relationships, etc. so you are
best to make the first sketch a 'standard' planar sketch (e.g. the plan or
front elevation) and then attach your 3D sketches to the points on the
planar sketch - this will make your layout sketches drive much easier.

Regards

Merry