Configurations - How do I make them ? 1

[Adrian2]

Dear Folks;

I have a die cast housing design for which I wish to make casting and machining drawings. I tried to set up a separate configuration for the cast part but I cant get it to work.

In SW 2001, I have clicked on the configuration manager and right clicked the part name to add a configuration, then called this configuration "Cast Part". When I go back to the feature manager to suppress the machined features, I cannot reactivate the original part. I still only have one part.

There must be something simple I am doing wrong, Would someone be kind enough to point it out ?

Regards Adrian

 

[SBaugh]

Well if you have 2 configs one saying Cast and other Machined. You may only need to change the Dims. per Config, but be carful! When you change the dims for the first time you will also have to change the property to "This Configuration" only. Or you can suppress some features and add new ones. Depnds on what your looking for. If you need an example Let me know and I'll post one up at my site.

I hope that helps, Scott Baugh, CSWP
credence69@REMOVEhotmail.com

http://www.3dmca.com

http://home.insightbb.com/~scott.baugh/

*When in doubt always check the help*

 

[krishnamurthy]

Goto Configuration manager, double-click the configuration you require (default,Cast Part) In feature manager you can see that changes you had made in that configuration come alive.
Example: If you want to change extrution depth. Do not go to edit definition and change. Instead you double-click the extrution,etc . The graphic window shows dimensions of the double-clicked item. Doubleclick on dimension you require. Here you can find that in dialog box Items such as "In all Configurations, Named configuration, This configuration" is available. Carefully select.
Whereas for new features created. the newly added features are for only the current configurations, in others it will be supressed. You can unsupress them if you desire as required.
In Assemblies the newly added parts/assy are visibile in all configurations. You need to supress the part if you do not require in some configurations or unsupress the assembly mates.
Thus it is just additional care needed for Multiple configurations.

 

[DennisD]

Actually, there is something even more appropriate than using configurations in this case and that is using the Base Part approach. When designing castings you basically have two parts, the casting itself and the finished part made from the casting. The finished part is usually machined or has some other secondary operations performed on it.

Try this for yourself to see if it is indeed a better solution:
1. Create the cast part in all its glory and save it as "Test Part - Casting.sldprt"
2. Open a new part file.
3. Go to Insert then select Base Part. A dialogue box will open for you to select the file to use as the base part.
4. Find and select "Test Part - Casting.sldprt". This will be your base part.
5. Save this new part file as "Test Part - Machined.sldprt"

Notice that this part file has as its base feature "Test Part - Casting". It looks a lot like a dumb solid, as if you had imported a parasolid. But this is so much better because it is NOT a dumb part, it is associative. Notice the "->" following the feature name, indicating this has a reference to another file.

In this 'machined' part file you can create all the secondary features you like. When you create dimensioned drawings from this 'machined' part file only the features you created in this file are available to dump their dimensions. The dimensions of the cast part don't show up here (unless you manually create those dimensions). This alone is enough reason to use this approach.

When I do this I make my cast part a light gray color (I'm usually designing aluminum or zinc). In the machined part file I am usually only making cuts so I go into Tools, Options, Document Properties, Colors and then select Cut and change its color to something to contrast with the color of the base part.

This worked so well, especially with the contrasting colors. I was able to conduct a design review that was very well received by our machinists. They could see the casting that they were going to be working with and the material they needed to remove.

With this associativity you actually have an easier control over your situation than you do with configurations. If you make a change to the base part (casting), such as showing ejector pin marks, gate sprues, or just changes to the basic geometry, it shows up properly in the machined part file that references it. Also note that these types of changes would precede any machining. If you were to do this with configurations you should have ALL of the features that create the casting precede the machined features in your feature manager tree.

I often will have a cast housing that has several different part machined from it. For this approach I'll make the different machinings in the same part file using configurations, but using this Base Part approach to reference the raw casting. Often these different parts have much of the machining in common so this works extremely well. Design tables are even used in this situation if that is the most appropriate way to solve the problem.

Don't get me wrong, you can do a cast and machined part in one file using configurations. But I think you'll find this Base Part approach to be much cleaner and simpler in the long run.

- - -DennisD

 

[Adrian2]

Dear Dennis;

I was able to get configurations working as per Scott and Krishnamurthy' advice. Many thanks to them. I think your idea has a great deal of merit too. The part I am designing is a Zinc Die Cast part. I appreciate your comments about placing casting features first in the feature manager design tree as I did have to re-arrange some features to get my machining configuration to work properly. While this part is a "one-off" I often encounter castings that are used in a variety of mounting arrangements. Clearly the base part scenario would work well there. The only problem I can see with using base part castings is the same problem you have with autocad xref's; You might revise a casting used by many other files and accidently make changes that render some of your top level finished parts invalid. Mind you, that's more of a document management issue.

Many thanks for your kind advice !

Adrian D.