Assembly arrangements in subassemblies

[sanahire]

Hi Experts,
Being new to the NX8.5 assembly world, I hope to get advice on managing the arrangements in the sub assembly and the top assembly. We have a machine sub assembly that is being reused in many assemblies. I was told that the arrangements can be stored at the Top level. But then I have to create corresponding arrangements at the subassembly level as well. This would create a scenario where I have to store arrangements at the subassembly level. Now when this subassembly is used in another assembly where the next user is not interested in seeing the arrangements created by the previous user, he would see a large list of arrangements from the previous users; not to his liking. Is this the correct way to manage arrangements? I see that the list of arrangements growing multifold as the subassembly is reused.
I come from Ideas user community where we used to manage the configurations (similar to arrangements in NX) at the top level by using/un-using the assembly configurations. I guess different software but very similar concept.
Any suggestions to manage the assembly arrangements more efficiently?Thanks.

 

[dtharrett]

I am certainly no expert but can offer a few suggestions. We design machines and re-use sub-assemblies all the time. Typically in the sub we will save a few generic arrangements. If those arrangements are suitable for the top level, great we use them. However, in many cases, the generic arrangement does not fill the needs of the top level assembly. What I do is use the "overide position" tool/command. This brings the control of the constraints into the top level assembly without affecting other designer's assemblies.

For example, we import slides from various pneumatics vendors. Typically the slide is a sub-assembly of 5 or 6 components. We save the slide assembly with two arrangements (extend and retract). Anyone can use the slide in their assembly (we are TC managed). If we need something different than the saved arrangements, we just overide position from our top level and take control of the constraints. Hope this helps.