weldment feature - usable?

I'm doing more weldments lately, and started through the tutorial.
The modeling section was simple enough, but in the drawing part, the
ballooning didn't work very well at all.
Several of the components cannot be ballooned at all.
I need to get BOMs filled in accurately. Is this feature ready for
production drawing use?

Thanks,
Bill

 

Weldments use a Cut List (multi-body part) not a BOM (assembly).
Works ok for us.

hth

 

Am I correct in assuming that the cut-list information can't be incorporated
into the top level BOM on a drawing of a higher assembly? This would look
like the components within a subassembly. I have some customers that want
all components to be listed out in the top BOM.

Bill

 

You are correct, the weldment would be listed as an one item.

 

Sometimes, we all find a customer that want's strange things. But, you
imply that you have more then one that want's the same strange BOM
configuration. Sometimes it is better to just tell your customers that
this is not easily done and that it will cost more to do it by hand. A
matter of "customer management".

There are a lot of purchased parts that consist of more then one
individual parts that come as a sub-assembly and are only listed once
on the BOM. I think that a good rule of thumb for any BOM "system" is
that there is only a single reference to any one item. This eliminates
the error of one of the call outs being changed and the secondary
callouts being missed, (which creates a discrepency). It is also a
good rule of thumb that the information for a weldment, (ie.
sub-assembly) to be kept separate of the main assembly. Otherwise the
main assembly BOM can easily grow so large that it is very hard to find
a individual item. Then there is the problem of when there are
multiple items of the weldment on the assmbly. If there are two or
more cross bars in the weldment and there are multiple weldments, and
if the weldment items are in the BOM then the total number of cross
bars need to be multiplied. But, every time there are changes in the
number of weldments in the assembly, the quantity for every item in the
weldment will need to be updated in the BOM. Because of this and a
number of other potential situations, to put weldment parts, (or any
sub-assembly) into the main assembly is just asking for big trouble.
It is much better to keep them separated, which is what SW programmed
in as a standard practice.

Hope this help you to be able to "guide" your clients, at least most of
them.

Ed

 

Customers in this case are DOD aircraft and automotive (household names), so
I don't think I'll be guiding them too much into new procedures and away
from their "strange things".
I think the gist of having all the components in the main BOM has to do with
exporting data out (from one source) that can be massaged by the people
doing the buying, scheduling, cutting, etc. They don't want to go through
numerous drawing sheets to complete a takeoff. I would tend to agree with
them on this, so I guess I disagree with your approach pretty much down the
line.

Bill

 

There is one other alternative.

In the weldment;
- right click on each body
- insert into new part
- after each component has been saved start a new assy
- in the new sub-assy, insert each saved body from the weldment
- select origin of new sub-assy for insertion point for "each" body

That's correct, each component will be fixed to the sub-assy origin and
presto you're done. No mates! Neat thing is its dynamic. If the weldment
(part) changes so do the saved bodies which ultimately results in the
sub-assy updating. You now have a sub-assy to which you can add a bom.

However, making individual drawings for each tube will suk, imho.

hth
kenneth

 

kenneth
that sounds interesting and i'll try it out.
i wonder if it really is any faster than doing a traditional subassembly
(instead of the weldment feature) in the first place.
probably the only way to know for sure is to test drive it.
bill

 

it's faster!

zero mates in the sub-assy is a huge incentive. plus the
trimming/extending/mitre features, gussets, end caps etc that weldments
provide. need i say more.

weldments are fast and easy to create, not to mention flat out cool to use.