Performance question

My employer doesn't currently produce assemblies and drawings of complete pieces of equipment, but I'm pushing them in that direction as the lack of proper documentation causes problems.

A complete system (we make textile creels) comprises upto 2000 repeated positions, but this is broken down into 3 sections, and each section is sub-divided into 7-10 "frames". It is therefore easy and logical to divide this up into sub-assemblies.

However, ultimately, there will be a heck of a lot of geometry on screen. When working with a full layout, we aren't interested in the fasteners, bearings etc that are present in the sub-assys's or sub-sub-assy's. My thought is to create a simplified config of each sub-assy, with only the major components visible. This config will be used in the higher level assys. The default config with everything visible will be used if a sub-assys drawing is required.

My first question is, I'll need a top-level BOM that lists ALL components at all levels, so does that rule out suppressing components in sub-assys? I used to use I-Deas, and it had the BOM option of "include supressed instances" - can SWX do this?

Some of the sub-assys will only be created to simplify managing the geometry and speed up solving of mates. Is it possible to exclude these "dummy" sub-assys from the BOM, but still include the components they comprise?

Is it worth also creating a simplified config of parts, that have internal features, fillets etc suppressed. Again, the default config would be used for the part drawing, but the simplified would be used in assemblies. Does anyone work this way?

TIA John Harland SWX2004

As far as I know, suppressed components are treated the same as if they were deleted altogether. If they're suppressed, they're not included in the BOM. I would suggest hiding them instead of suppressing them... you won't have any mate issues that way, and they'll still show up in the BOM. However, they are still loaded into memory (will take longer to load the assembly) but hiding them will dramatically improve graphics performance.

Yes. There is an "Exclude from bill of materials" option for parts and assemblies. Do a "Properties" on the component you wish to exclude.

My 2 cents... using configs can be a blessing and a curse. They are one of the most useful features of any 3-D parametric program, but at the same time, can be one of the most troublesome. They can be a real pain to set up, and can be very troublesome to work around if you're not careful.

I would suggest that you do all your config definitions AFTER you finish the deisgn completely. Yeah, I know it defeats the purpose of some of your reasons for using configs in the first place, but I think you'll see why once you get into it.

If you make good use of subassemblies, it's not too hard to simply hide or suppress the items you wish to ignore in your main assembly "on the fly" without using configs. One other option... get a faster computer. heh.