Scott,
You asked, "So I wonder what it is your designing that would make you think SW may not be the Tool for you?"
We are designing an airplane but I did not mean to intimate that SW may not be the Tool for us even though this is true to a large measure.
We have about 12 seats of SW and are in the process of buying 4 more seats plus a PDM worth about $20,000 which should help us for concurrent driving of SW. As you commented we have found ways to make SW our primary tool. For example we have one seat of Catia which helps with complex surfaces particularly with developing flat patterns.
Besides the problems associated with concurrent design, the problem I was trying to relate is that 2003 apparently has some bugs that is showing up as taking excessive time to save model files. As stated at the outset of this thread
File is 3,126 KB.
Added several swept features and takes 2.5 to 3 minutes to save. The feature is a relatively simple cross section swept around circular holes.
Any idea why 2003 would take so long?
Notice that I said swept around circular holes. This is not a helix or any such complex drive curve. It is a circle and the cross section being driven is relativley simple comprised of two concentric arcs joined with two tangent parallel lines with a perpendicular line at the ends of these two straght lines. The other end of the arcs are pierced to the circles which are the edges of hole cut thru sheet metal. There are 3 sizes of holes and aout 8 holes altogether.
To reiterate my solution given on Nov 25, "I deleted all “On Edge ?” relations in Sketch 17 for Cut-Extrude 5 for FS 34 Frame. It saved in seconds."
Now then the engineer I am working with had a similar problem with long time to save (minutes) of a different part so I checked all of his sketches but no in-context relations. Some other problem?? Bill, a designer with SW college training and one of our better SW drivers is complaining of long save times and several others are waiting and wating for files to save.
Our avionics/systems engineer who helps manage our networking got tired of wating for files to save the other day and rebooted the server. Maybe this helped because I did not hear any complaints today but maybe most folks are resigned to the problem until our rep comes in to train us for the new PDM.
Is anybody else having problems with long save times for SW 2003?