Is it possible to assign different materials to each body in a multi-body part? This would be useful for example on rubber coated rollers, parts injection moulded from more than one material, or OEM parts where you downloaded it as an assembly and want to save it off as a single part.
I used to be able to do this in I-DEAS and can't see whether it's possible in SWX 2007 sp3.1.
John H
No. One way around this is to design the parts in a multi-body part, then import that part into new parts, where you delete all but one of the bodies, then assign materials to the new parts. (It's much easier, but much more dangerous, to use the Split function to generate your new parts. I would not recommend it, having recently spent several days repairing a Split that got confused.)
Jerry Steiger
"Jerry Steiger" wrote
Jerry,
That's an interesting method I hadn't considered before, though it doesn't really help in this case. I don't want the bodies to exist as separate part files, because they would never do so in reality - if you mould a component out of different materials, the individual bits never exist in isolation. I just want to get the correct mass properties out of the part, and also for the materials specified for the part to properly define it. I guess I was spoilt by I-DEAS.
I can feel another enhancement request coming on.....
Out of interest, in what way did the split part get confused?
Regards, John H
Sometimes it does, depending on how you mold your parts. If you do an insert molding, the substrate does exist as a separate part. If you do a multi-shot mold it doesn't, and the overmold in the insert molded part never exists on its own. We run relatively low quantities so we can't afford the cost or time for two-shot mold, so I just have one non-existent part to keep track of. (Actually two, since the guys building the overmold tool usually want the joined substrate and overmold as well.)
The master part and its children were built in SW2004 and didn't give us any trouble. When I converted it to SW2007, one of the children took the wrong body, so that one body wasn't used at all and one was used in two parts. I wasted a good part of a day trying to split the master into the correct parts before I gave up and inserted the full base part in each child, then used surface cuts instead of a split to remove the parts not needed.
We were probably just lucky that Split Part worked as well as it did for as long as it did. As I recall, it can also fail if you insert a feature just before the split, so that the name of the feature changes.
Jerry
Jerry,
Thanks for the tip.
John H
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