Large Assembly tips wanted.

Did you do a search?

Lots of good info already posted.

Phil,

If you have been to SWW you can look in your CD as they have had sessions on this for the last couple years. I won't cover their stuff.

There are a few good rules/suggestions:

1. Use in context when building parts then remove the references. Don't forget inplace mates..
2. Put in hardware last, put it in a folder and make a config with hardware suppressed for use in higher level assemblies.
3. Keep patterns to a minimum, especially in higher level assemblies
4. Use pattens to place parts and then dissolve and mate.
5. Never, never, never mate to a patterned component. When adding new mates roll back to the mate folder to prevent accidentaly mating to a patterned part.
6. Use display states to hide select items instead of section view whenever possible.
7. Use Alt key mating whenever possible. It's just plain faster.
8. Do not let SW get into MateXpert mode.

And of course the obvious stuff like always fix cherries and lollipops.*

Run SuperRebuild from time to time in higher level assemblies to make sure everything is up to date. This of course is the opposite of working lightweight.

Just my 2 cents.

TOP

• Cherries are those annoying red balls

• Lollipops are the yellow triangles.

Got some tips here:

Quick reference: Make sure all components are fully defined. Make sure all sketches in the parts are fully defined. These two points alone will improve performance when working in large assemblies.

Matt Lorono

Matt Lombard's original site has some. See "Large Assemblies" under Rules of Thumb and "Efficient Assemblies" under User Groups. These are pretty old, but I don't think too much is really out of date.

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

Use the Isolate feature. I use it many times every day because you can very quickly hide all but what you want to work with right then and there, and not worry about whether or not you can find it in a sub somewhere. Rotations don't have to calculate edges you don't care about, you can quickly rotate around to get to the other side, you can select faces easier, etc. And then when ready to go back, just click the button again. The only problem I have seen with it is that some of the time, parts in a pattern will not come back - you have to go manually show them again.

WT