Hello, all ,new fellow here.
I've been working with Solidworks for about half a year now, off and on. Two things that have been bugging me is (1) that old nemesis, revision control and (2) flowing info from the model into the bill of materials.
Disclaimer: I'm new to newsgroups as well, so if there are other threads on the subjects, could someone tell me how to find them, so as to not waste anyone else's time? Now on to the "meat":
The way we've always done our drawings, whether of weldments or assemblies or single parts, etc, ahs always been drawing number-based. We've always used that "group" system, and often would lay out multiple pieces of a fabrication on one drawing, then show it welded up, etc. on the same sheet. Perhaps bad practice, but it's always worked for us.
Let's continue with a weldment as the example. On that drawing, the assembled weldment would be designated as a "group". A drawing that required that part would order it in the bill of materials as "Dwg. XYZN01, Group X." Thus our Solidworks drawing file would be "XYZNO1.slddrw"
We've figured on dumping the "group" system and concentrating more on single-item drawings at the base level. A "group" is basically a subassembly, anyway. The real bill of materials problem comes in at the assembly level.
Now in that same column in the bill might be other such sub-assemblies or weldments, as well as, say, fasterners, maybe an additional plate (designated by it's dimensions) and so on- which are, of course, different data types, and bam!- I'm buggered.
I've figured out a way to pass dimensional info into the bill. (Ex: a plate, you sketch width and length, make a custom property, and designate them for it. Then you extrude the thickness, hang a reference dim. off of that and designate it for the same field.) But I cannot seem to come up with unified scheme for generating a bill of materials without several columns that used to be just one column on our bill.
The next issue then comes with revising the drawings if needed. Any opinions as to whether it's better to do this at the model level (with the custom property) or the drawing level? It seems like, in a complicated assembly, that if you do it at the drawing level it's be awfully easy to lose track of what drawings need changed when a change is made somewhere.
I have other issues, too, with materials, but this is long enough for a
1st post. Thanks all for your reading patience and any help/re-direction you can provide).BTW, we are a small office that shares a single licence on an as-needed basis.
Tom