NO MORE DRAWINGS

Everyone, I am currently working on a project to eliminate or reduce the amount of drawings we do and send to the shop. We are wanting to give the shop the abilitiy to view models that already have the crucial dimensions displayed. We dont want to give them full access to models and we also want to simplify it for them as much as we can. We are looking into some viewers like Edrawings and what not but not sure if that is the route to take, we do currently use DBworks which has some viewing capabilities. We have alot of great ideas and I just want to get some input from you guys, has anyone ever done this and has it worked well for you, any ideas and input will be greatly appreciated. Can anyone recommend some good viewing programs for SW models that is not very costly.

Thanks, Stew

Reply to
thestew
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Just my 2 cents here, but I have seen a lot of shops go through this process-and then back (if they manage to stay in business). The shops I work with that are REALLY kicking butt send more drawings-not less to the shop. They don't make detail drawings for anything that will be handled by the cnc mills, but they do detail everything else because they have found that work goes through the shop much faster if the machinist doesn't have to spend his time querying the model every time he wants to make a cut. Engineering intensive is the way to go IMHO. Get the guy off his butt and away from the computer and standing at his machine making chips.

YMMV.

jk

Reply to
John Kreutzberger

Our buisness is kind of unique. We build large utitlity structures. We are trying to eliminate the layout drawings, we are already in the process of eliminating the smaller part drawings that are cut by CNC, but let me ask you, what do the parts getted checked against if there are no drawings? Basicly our shop using the layout drawings to layout parts on the structure and weld them in place. We know we probably won't eliminate the drawings totally but I feel that we can give tham a model and maybe a very generic drawing with it. The problem is we are spended 60 to 70% of our time doing drawings because they are so detailed. If we could eliminate that our out put to the shop would gp through the roof. Thanks for the reply and again I appreciate all the input I get from yall.

Stew

Reply to
thestew

Modelpress had a free viewer with measuring, but Myriad got all over tha company so it's not free anymore -> eDrawings Professional might be better.

Reply to
Markku Lehtola

We are doing Reduced Dimension Drawings, this is kind of the best of both worlds. We have a document for our travelers, ISO 9000, etc; but we do not spend hours creating complete details.

I have some posts about this on my blog (mid to end of the page):

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You may also want to look at ASME Y14.41-2003

Good luck in your quest. You may not totally get rid of drawings but you can greatly reduce the amount of time spent in engineering completely detailing a part that the guys are going to us the math data directly anyway. It is a big time saver for us.

Cheers,

Anna Wood

Reply to
Anna Wood

Anna, First of all thank you very much for your last post, you are always so helpful. I have to ask you though. How do you keep up with all the data, revisions and stuff like that, it seems like it could be a nightmare to keep track of when drawings are not involved.

Stew

Reply to
thestew

We still create drawings. We are never going to get away from that. We just do not dimension every single, nit-picky detail on a drawing. Just what is needed for those operators in our company that still use manual systems i.e: the grinders, jig bore operations, etc and any special notes and stuff that do not do as well in the data files. It is a balance to have only what is necessary on a drawing and not re- hash the entire math model again on a detail.

Also if you go all electronic, and that is what the ASME spec will help you with, you rev control those files just like a drawing, with custom properties, etc. PDM/ERP systems help with all of this. A file is a file, be it a Word doc, CNC G-Code file, solid model file, engineering drawings, work instrution, traveler, ISO docs, they all can be rev controlled and you have to have the systems in place to help you manage them.

We use a product that my company's software division markets called VisualVault. There are oddles of different software products that can help you manage your documents.

Cheers,

Anna

Reply to
Anna Wood

We mostly do critical to function (CTF) drawings, which I imagine are analagous to your 'reduced dimension drawings'. Since most of our stuff is made directly from the CAD data, we focus our efforts on developing inspection drawings to insure that parts that are supposed to fit actually will... fit. We believe strongly that drawing aren't going away. Sure, we don't need to define every stupid cross-section on stuff "that doesn't matter" (note quotes) that will be machined from the CAD data anyway, but without a dated and revision controlled piece of paper (or locked digital file) defining CTF dims (with tolerances), how can you hold a vendor accountable if what you paid for doesn't turn out to be what you paid for? Answer - a drawing (or pdf file of a drawing) Ed

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

Ed,

We are in agreement, just have some different terminolgy. What you state is our philosophy also.

In some areas we have a bit more detail/verbiage on a drawing. In others we let the math data do the talking. We always work very closely with our manufacturing folks to make sure we are giving them what they need to complete our builds efficiently. We have had pretty good success with our RDD's.

One distinct advantage we have with implementing RDD's is that there is very little that we design that we send out to have someone else build. Even with that it is amazing how many of our suppliers have no issues working with math data and a reduced dimension drawing. I am hard pressed to even name one where that was an issue for them.

Cheers,

Anna

Reply to
Anna Wood

Stew, I work for a job shop doing fabricated metal - both heavy equipment, paving and military, and a lot of point of purchase displays. Over the past year we have gone to a paperless shop. We installed 20 some shop carts and all our job routings are looked up on these pc's, time logged and material tracked. Also, we have attached all the prints to the job routings, using either tif scans or edrawings. This has save a huge amount of time in the shop - no lost job travelers, no paper prints to track, and revision control is very easy. With edrawings the number of parts made backward has been reduced. Our next initiative is to replace all customer prints with only our own layouts. This will help the shop in not having to interpret a hundred-plus different drawing schemes.

Paperless routings and prints has been a tremendous time saver and cost reducer. The engineering work load is about the same and the benefits to the shop have easily paid for the shop computers.

Anna and Ed, I love the idea of RDD's with CTF dimensions. We do this on sample orders and in-house tooling. This is usually done when the customer supplies us with SW data. We mark the print as "customer supplied data." The inspector checks given dimensions and visible features. If a hole is shown on the print but not dimensioned it needs to be on the part, and if it looks like it's about the right size and in the right location, then it's ok to run the part. Production runs now are frequently stopped by the night inspector who won't sign off if a dimension is missing, even though all cutting programs are driven by the same files.

We will be discussing RDD's here in the near future to improve our flow of work.

Interesting discussion and valuable input.

regards, Diego

Reply to
Diego

Stew,

I don't recommend sending out dumb files or reference only files. Use the SolidWorks native files. Much cleaner. No translation, interpretation issues. There may be reasons to want to protect your models, but in my experience, it's not worth the trouble. Use vendors you trust, and have nondisclosures in place.

That a side, if you feel you must protect your files, send dumb models. This will allow your vendor to import them into their CNC much easier.

Matt Lorono

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Reply to
fcsuper

Something that hasn't been mentioned is the question of if you can open the CAD files in 10 years.

What if you don't continue to subscribe to Solidworks, and the version you have won't install on "Windows Super-Duper". Or you have subscribed, but the files won't open in the version you now have?

Joe Dunfee

Reply to
Joe

Answer - a drawing (or pdf file of a drawing)

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

Joe, My earlier glib answer - 'drawings' - has been niggling in the back of my brain all day. Sorry about it, because you brought up a good point. Drawings convey the CTF dims, but CAD commonly drives the rest. So how do I save that to use in the next decade?

What if I try to open that CAD file in ten years and tool off of it?

With a SWx file, I won't warranty that the 3D data was the same if you open it in ten DAYS if there was a new service pack to SWx. Most of the baseline features will rebuild correctly, but there is plentiful history of other features (lofts & sweeps for sure, and possibly fills and boundaries based on their relatives) not rebuilding the same from service pack to service pack. And certainly, over the last ten years of explosive growth in the product, we can expect 'fillet' and other features to act differently after a rebuild today than they did in 1997.

If you want to retain your CAD data as a snapshot in time to represent the released state of your design, I don't think (and in my experience I know that) you cannot currently rely on history based files.

If you want to build the same tool in 2017 that you built in 2007 you need a copy of the data in a 'dumb' format like IGES or, preferably for SWx, parasolid.

And here I am just being Ed - To be honest, I have no data that those files also won't change as versions change, but I make a point of saving all released parts in both on the assumption that they are locked in time. It's the only option that I know of that I have (love to hear others comments on that)

_________________________________

To predict the next ten years, all I can call on is the last ten years.

Parasolid and iges were there ten years ago, and I have heard nada about them going away, so they seem like a safe bet (except for not KNOWING that the file as opened today is exactly the same as it was in

1997. Anyone tested this?).

The bigger problem in my mind is storage media... For instance, I have hundreds of files on zip disks and I have had to make a point of carrying over my old zip drive to access them How much longer will that old zip drive be supported? Burned CD's turn into coasters in less than half a decade (though there are exceptions in both directions). Hard drives are cheap and seem to hold up for a good long time, but who hasn't had personal or secondary experience with a hard-drive un-recoverably failing? In ten years, will we still be on hard drives or will it all be solid state? No clue.

Then there is turnover in the company (which hopefully a pdm system will mitigate, assuming that your current pdm is still viable in 2007 and that 'Bob' followed the rules) and a lot of other soft factors (when 'Bob' left the company did he tell someone how stuff was saved?).

I don't know what will happen in 2017, but maybe we can extrapolate lessons for the future from what happens today.

When we are asked to reproduce a design from 1997, the CAD data is usually lost on some zip disk or a long lost tape or hard-drive, and everyone involved has moved on to other jobs.

  1. Give me the drawing so I can understand the CTF dims and tolerances
  2. We 3D scan an early article of the product (or in the worst case the worn tooling of the prodcut) so we can rebuild it from scratch.

In 2017, It'll always be a bonus round if we have an IGES or Parasolid of the orignal nominal design, but in our back pockets we will always have the fallback of 3D scan of early articles or tooling for lost data files. But for CTF dims and tolerances, nothing in my imagination will ever beat a drawing. And that is the long version of my earlier glib answer.

Hope this has some value to you, Ed

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

In that case there needs to be a migrate button whereby the dataset is maintained. Version 1 would have a base template, while each succeeding version would use objects that contain the same base template. Each object is one branch of a tree which has the same template from v. 1 but also inherits properties of the object before it. While the bottom will have the smallest common dataset, its "root template" top of the tree has the most history.

Each object going up the tree (version no.) inherits the objects dataset from the one before it, in this way each object remembers with each newer version.

CAD/CAM companies likely hired manufacturing folks with software writing skills, if not assembly language found in controllers or C language also common in controllers and CAD/CAM as well. Neither C or Assembly have objects which extend the C and Assembly structure with inheritance.

John

Reply to
John Scheldroup

This got me thinking too. Long-term storage is a problem. My first thought is to suggest an alternative to your suggestions for a long-term format. Parasolid is still an evolving format, so I'm not sure it would be a good idea to trust it. IGES is fixed by a standard, so it should be as stable as long as the translation software builds models correctly. I've had better luck with STEP files, but YMMV. STEP is also a standardized format, and it is still being developed. Not so much changed, as added onto. I'm not aware of any standardized format that can store texture data though, and that might be important to some designs.

This problem is larger than just the CAD industry. Governments are also taking an interest in long-term storage of documents, and several have realized that MS Office can't be trusted. This is why there is so much news in the IT industry about MS trying to force adoption of their "open" format as an ISO standard. OpenOffice.org is a real threat to them in this situation. IIRC there is already a non-proprietary ISO-standard xml formatted document format, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 can use it as the default format. In other words, future compatability is guaranteed.

Drawings have nothing that guarantees future compatability with an official standard. The closest thing is pdf, which is the de facto standard, but still proprietary. It's based on PostScript, which is at least published. I'm not sure if it's an officially adopted standard. DXF is also well published, but it shares AutoCAD's limitations, which are numerous. (The most insurmountable reason dwg/dxf compatability can be a problem is that there are things that the format cannot store, which other CAD formats can). TIFF is, I believe, a standard, but obviously not ideal. Still, it's as safe as the storage medium.

I agree with you that hard drives are the most reliable backup tool. I almost said magnetic medium, but I never met a reliable tape backup. The problem with storage of electronic data is that it is so fragile, much more so than paper. Printing drawings and raw model data to microfilm might be the most stable thing to do, but I've never heard of it being done. I think the most secure thing to do right now would be keeping miltiple copies on physically separated hard drives that are very regularly refreshed to new hardware. Recent reports show that the most common age for HD failure is two years (for running drives), so that might be an important figure in how often a HW refresh is required. At thre very least, the drives should be replaced with whatever the current mainstram interface is. PATA is going to be completely gone soon, replaced by SATA drives. I don't know whay you would do right now if you had critical data on a SCSI RAID set. I don't know enough about that interface to know what forms can still be used.

At any rate, any company with data they want to keep should obviously have a data storage system in place. The one advantage of electronic formats is that it's so easy to make a backup, unlike those rooms full of flammable drawings they used through the last century. The trick is to actually make sure that you make those backups.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

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