Here's my situation:
We design and build Kiosks. Our sales department designs "dummy" models in solidworks and then exports it to get rendered for the client to approve, and that usually works out fine. The models are fully solid, only surface details, etc.
When it comes to actually building the unit though, we've been unsure how to proceed. The shop used to use Autocad and it would take a week to update any kind of details for the shop drawings. About a year ago, they decided to "get with the times" and get a solid modeller. Solidworks (basic version) was what was chosen at the time (pro-e is still a little pricey, and the designer had bad experiences with Inventor). Having a solid model driving the drawings would make updating a breeze, or so we thought.
When it comes time to actually model a unit though, it seems to be more complicated than we anticipated. They are made of wood primarily (plywood, etc), with metal accessories (handles, slides, hinges, etc). Our first project was done as an assembly, with each panel of wood a seperate part, but the assembly started to get overly complicated REALLY quickly. Our project folders were immense, for what seemed like a simple product. For our drawings, we typically have to show a fully assemebled unit, cross sections, indicating the panel ID's to reference a cut-list. Sometimes drawer front or something would be shown individually. As an assembly, it wasn't too hard to put together the required assemblies to insert into our drawing package, but the actual design time was much longer than intended.
We then tried doing a welded assembly. This greatly sped up design time, not having to name each part individually, deal with mates, etc. We could model a whole unit in a day or two. But then came the tricky part: doing the drawings. Cross sections were 'ok' (semmed a little slow to work with though). But when it came time to show only a few of the solid bodies as a seperate "assembly" in the drawing package, were we unsure of the best way to seperate that from the original welded assembly. We originally selected the individual bodies, then selected 'insert into new part', and while thats fine as-is, we often found ourselves wanting to add or remove a body from that 'export' we just did, so as to still stay parametric to the original welded assembly, but we couldn';t accomplish this without deleting it and basiacally starting over; losing all the work we had done in the drawing. We also considered configurations, but that ended up being terribly slow, seeming like it loaded thw whole assembly each time we wanted to do a view, and it ended up taking 30+ seconds to switch pages in our drawing package.
Basically we're at a loss, everything seems too slow and clunky to work like we would want to. Our computers are by no means slow, 2 gigs of ram, dual core intel bla bla..
Does anyone else have experience building and detailing assemblies of this sort? what would you suggest? How would you go about building it from the ground up? welded assembly? plain old assembly modeling? configurations? etc? Anything suggestion that could help speed this process up would help, and our VAR doesn't seem to be much help. If you work with large assemblies, what tricks do you use to keep your software running smoothly? opening a drawing package right now takes ages, let along switching pages, it's getting quite irritating.
I had previously used solidworks in a machine shop for years and had honestly no complaints, since i really wasn't working with large assemblies, i was mostly dealing with sometimes complex, single models to be machined on CNC, quite a different world i tell ya!
Thanks!
Andr=E9 Richard The idiot that suggested Solidworks.