Big Family of Part files

[beardyjohn]

Hi all, searched though but couldn't find anything relevent so here goes....

Recently changed jobs and now using SE for tubular aluminium frame design. When the system was first set up, some four years ago, it was decided to use Family of Parts (FOP) instead of Frame design, as we need to attach a drawing number to every individual tube cut length for lazer cutting. The problem we are having now is that after so many years some of the tube part files have upwards of 60 members. This makes new design extremely time consuming, having to populate all the other members, and the FOP table is huge!

My prefered solution to this would be to use Frame design and attach the drawing number to the tube part in the assembly. However, there seems to be no way of renaming the tube part, or attaching a custom variable that would come out in the BOM on a draft file.

All the people I have spoken to, including our SE reseller, can't come up with a suitable solution, so I would be interested if anyone else has had the same problem.

 

[fredericmenage]

hi,

it's a bit long but you could build your frame then use 'save selected model as'(file menu) for each piece of frame. Then you would have individual part files for each piece of frame (what you are missing now); so you could add the relevant properties to be used in your BOM to those new part files. Then you would need to reassemble all these part files in a new asm (press ctrl when dragging in each piece of frame to ground it to the right place) and build you draft using this new asm.

HTH,

Fred