Reorder in Assembly
Reorder in Assembly
(OP)
Excuse this rookie mistake but here's my problem. I have an assembly with a base plate. I have added components to the plate and later added some holes in the plate by editing the plate in the assembly. Now those holes don't show up in the part. They are on the end of the tree in the assembly and I can't reorder them if that's the correct procedure I get the error "cannot reorder after an assembly component" How bad did I goof this up?






RE: Reorder in Assembly
Yes, rookie mistake.
Sounds like you added the holes as an assembly-level feature, and not to the base plate itself.
An example assembly-level cut would be a hole cut through all of the pieces of a welded structure. In your case, they only affect the one part.
What you needed to do was make sure you were actually editing the component in-context. To activate a part to edit in-context, you need to right-click the part in the assembly tree and select "Edit part" (or subassembly), and all features would be added to the part itself.
To return to editing the top-level assembly, right-click the assembly icon in the model tree and select "Edit assembly".
RE: Reorder in Assembly
RE: Reorder in Assembly
In my case I made a hollow walled tank out of two parts (inside and outside) so I could easily hide the outside. I cut a hole through the bottom of the tank at an angle, and then inserted a pipe to go through the hole. Like I said it works the way I did it, but I just like to know all of my options.
RE: Reorder in Assembly
Imagine you have REAL objects in you hands. You glue some together and take a saw to them. NOW you take another part and glue it over the hole. The hole does not magically appear in that part, because you cut it half an hour ago when only the other bits of the assembly were present.
Remember that SW batabase is a serial solver - a TIME dependent database. That's what is so great about it. Things happen in the order you do them just like the real world. However it does allow time travel (with logical limitations). So if you rolled back to before the assembly cut and then inserted the part, bingo! the hole appears. You can even drag the part back up the tree (think of it as back in time). Now, obviously if it has some dependency on something AFTER the cut, it can't let you do that - there's the logical restriction. Right-click Parent/Child will help find those issues. Using sketches and planes, etc. which were not created in exactly the same order as the features that swallow them can complicate this, but you can usually figure it out.
It is interesting, that those of us who used a lot of older generation CAD systems (note I did say US) often have a problem understanding or at least remembering this all the time. We were so used to just stuffing more entities into a randomly organized database bucket. The line entity that our brain interpreted as the left corner of a "block" (actually 12 independent wire frame lines in space that just happen to touch) could easily be at the other end of a 4MB database from the line representing the right corner. Man, I'm so glad those days are gone..........
Be naughty - save Santa a trip.
RE: Reorder in Assembly
Say I made the cut and then put the pipe in. For some reason I may want the hole to cut through the pipe. Right now my only option is to delete the cut, then place another cut exactly the same.
Or if I placed a lot of parts and wanted to not cut through them I would have to delete the parts, make the cut, then replace the parts.
Either of these could get really time consuming. I wanted to know if you could do either of these using different methods. Oh, and dragging the pipe up the tree doesn't do anything.
As I was writing this I found the answer to one of my questions. Simply suppress any part you don't want to cut through then unsupress it afterwards.
RE: Reorder in Assembly
-Dustin Biber
RE: Reorder in Assembly
Be naughty - save Santa a trip.
RE: Reorder in Assembly
RE: Reorder in Assembly
By default the feature scope of such a cut includes all unsuppressed parts and subassemblies at the time of the creation of the cut. This is important to note especially if you have a large assembly and you only want the cut to affect a select few parts. I often find it faster to first suppress everything I don't want affected by the cut before making the cut. For one thing I can find and understand everything easy in the Feature Manager Tree than in the list box of the feature scope.
Simpler is always better and faster. The assembly cut has to compute the resulting geometry for everything included in the cut feature. This includes all parts listed in the feature scope, even if they are not actually cut.
Use assembly cuts, but include in the feature scope only what needs to be cut, however you decide to control what is included in the feature scope.
- - -Dennyd
RE: Reorder in Assembly
Be naughty - save Santa a trip.