Drawing within a drawing

[danhunter]

My current employees use a standard of inserting a supplier pdf of a drawing within their own soldiworks drawing border.

I'm almost sure that this isn't standard practice and intend putting in a purchase request for BS 8888. Although this is mightn't be referenced in said standard I thought I'd see if anyone had experience of this. I have never worked using this practice and think it would bring with it's own set of potential pitfalls.

Things I can think of off the top of my head would include:

1. PDF documents copied / inserted onto Solidworks are copied across as bitmap images and hence lose a significant amount of clarity. BOM almost unreadable in certain circumstances.
2. Master document would then contain two different revisions, Company and Supplier. For MRP purposes we would have to establish which was used going forward on this. Understanding that this revision is referenced as standard on all purchase orders. (so a supplier mightn’t know that our rev 00 references their latest rev C drawing...) We’d need to establish how we handle supplier up rev’d parts. (ie if we receive rev C do we make this 03 or 00? Then if we take receipt of rev D does this then become 04 / 01 respectively.)
3. Potential human input error in required copying across to respect orthographic projection drawing border. Dependant on US or UK supplier we’d have to be careful drawing border projections don’t contradict.
4. Any generic drawing tolerances, geometrics, surface finishes may differ from supplier and company borders.


So I wondered if others had other constructive criticism of this method or could argue reason for using this approach.

Daniel

 

[MintJulep]

I see the drawing in a drawing thing all the time.

Not only PDF. Often a true CAD drawing format is inserted into another drawing. The formats may or may not be fully compatible.

In addition to the problems you note also add all sorts of problems with line types, line scales, layers...

 

[ModulusCT]

Hi danhunter... We do this where I work. Simply put, it allows us to quickly turn out vendor item and source control drawings without having to reproduce information found on the customer data sheet. Many of our drawings of this type include only a cover sheet and a second page with applicable p/n scheme and applicable data from the data sheet. It's not my personal method of choice, but it's what we do here. To address your points directly...

1. We have found that if you place the .pdf into a Word document first, and then insert that .doc into the drawing as an image, we are able to maintain clarity of the original file. I'm not sure why it works, but it does. We use Autodesk Inventor.

2. We don't worry about this... If we find someday that what we have on our drawing differs in any meaningful way from a more recent revision to the customer data sheet, we simply update it. However, I suppose this could potentially cause problems with items that have a long lead time.

3. Yeah, some of the dimensioned parts we put on our drawing from the data sheet are atrocious. My boss isn't a drafting guy. He's got a physics degree and doesn't really have an intuitive grasp (or a desire to grasp) these types of problems.

4. We omit such things from the customer data sheet and allow our tolerance block to take over. Of course, this could be problematic when the purchased part does not jive with the stated tolerance on our drawing. Good thing we don't inspect our parts! /smacksforehead

This method is good if you value speed and simplicity above all other things.

 

[ptruitt]

Hi Dan,

You seem to be refering to either 'source control' (also called 'vendor item control') drawings or 'specification control' drawings. This quickly turns into a big subject. I recommend in-depth reading on enegineering documentation control before setting revision control and other policies for such practices. An optimal policy will efficiently facilitate customer and regulatory requirements.

Peter Truitt
Minnesota

 

[dgallup]

We insert supplier drawings into a simplified drawing format. I try to stay with vector formats, DXF, CGM, EPS, etc.

As far as rev levels go, they have their value, we have ours. When they make a change we have to make a change.

We don't put anything in our title block in this case except part number, title, date, rev level & company logo. All drawing specific stuff including tolerances, projections, etc. come from the supplier. If there is something wrong on their drawing we get them to fix it.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[ModulusCT]

"If there is something wrong on their drawing we get them to fix it."

@dgallup: Oh really? Wow... How do you manage that? And how often does your supplier tell you they won't / can't accommodate you?

I'm not a vegetarian because I dislike meat... I'm a vegetarian because I HATE plants!!