Reorder in Assembly 2

[bluesman0007]

Excuse this rookie mistake but here's my problem. I have an assembly with a base plate. I have added components to the plate and later added some holes in the plate by editing the plate in the assembly. Now those holes don't show up in the part. They are on the end of the tree in the assembly and I can't reorder them if that's the correct procedure I get the error "cannot reorder after an assembly component" How bad did I goof this up?

 

[TheTick]

Weelllll.....

Yes, rookie mistake.

Sounds like you added the holes as an assembly-level feature, and not to the base plate itself.

An example assembly-level cut would be a hole cut through all of the pieces of a welded structure. In your case, they only affect the one part.

What you needed to do was make sure you were actually editing the component in-context. To activate a part to edit in-context, you need to right-click the part in the assembly tree and select "Edit part" (or subassembly), and all features would be added to the part itself.

To return to editing the top-level assembly, right-click the assembly icon in the model tree and select "Edit assembly".

All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted.

 

[bluesman0007]

Thanks, I knew that, I guess the ole gray matter ain't what it used to be. Thanks again.

 

[sloth4z]

I noticed that sometimes you can make a cut through the entire assembly, then place a part inside of the cut without haveing the part affected. You have to insert the part after you make the cut. Is there another way to define the cut so that it doesn't cut through certain parts?

In my case I made a hollow walled tank out of two parts (inside and outside) so I could easily hide the outside. I cut a hole through the bottom of the tank at an angle, and then inserted a pipe to go through the hole. Like I said it works the way I did it, but I just like to know all of my options.

 

[JNR]

sloth4z, may I gently lead you though this, and you can kick yourself afterwards. (Don't feel bad, I do it all the time.)

Imagine you have REAL objects in you hands. You glue some together and take a saw to them. NOW you take another part and glue it over the hole. The hole does not magically appear in that part, because you cut it half an hour ago when only the other bits of the assembly were present.

Remember that SW batabase is a serial solver - a TIME dependent database. That's what is so great about it. Things happen in the order you do them just like the real world. However it does allow time travel (with logical limitations). So if you rolled back to before the assembly cut and then inserted the part, bingo! the hole appears. You can even drag the part back up the tree (think of it as back in time). Now, obviously if it has some dependency on something AFTER the cut, it can't let you do that - there's the logical restriction. Right-click Parent/Child will help find those issues. Using sketches and planes, etc. which were not created in exactly the same order as the features that swallow them can complicate this, but you can usually figure it out.

It is interesting, that those of us who used a lot of older generation CAD systems (note I did say US) often have a problem understanding or at least remembering this all the time. We were so used to just stuffing more entities into a randomly organized database bucket. The line entity that our brain interpreted as the left corner of a "block" (actually 12 independent wire frame lines in space that just happen to touch) could easily be at the other end of a 4MB database from the line representing the right corner. Man, I'm so glad those days are gone..........

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[sloth4z]

Okay let me see if I can explain myself better.

Say I made the cut and then put the pipe in. For some reason I may want the hole to cut through the pipe. Right now my only option is to delete the cut, then place another cut exactly the same.

Or if I placed a lot of parts and wanted to not cut through them I would have to delete the parts, make the cut, then replace the parts.

Either of these could get really time consuming. I wanted to know if you could do either of these using different methods. Oh, and dragging the pipe up the tree doesn't do anything.

As I was writing this I found the answer to one of my questions. Simply suppress any part you don't want to cut through then unsupress it afterwards.

 

[ShaggyPE]

Right click on the cut (in the feature tree) and edit feature scope. You can now choose which components you want to be included in that cut. It defaults to all parts in the assy at the time of the cut.
-Dustin Biber

 

[JNR]

Combine what Shaggy and I said. You may have to move things (parts and assembly features) forward or back in the tree (time). You do not necessarily need to delete and re-insert them. Even the assembly feature (cut) could be just dragged forward to after the extra parts are inserted then edited to include them as Shaggy says. If it will not let you re-order something, take a look at the parent/child relationships to find out way and most often you can easily fix it. Just remember that children cannot exist before their parents. However in our little SW world you can sometimes divorce them and it then become possible!

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[speedy12]

assembly features will go at the bottom of the tree below the mategroup and components are above the mategroup no matter when in "time" they were created. by changing the feature scope of the assembly feature like shaggy said, you can easily control which components will be affected by the feature. However, when you create an assembly feature, it is just that, a feature that is only present in the assembly.

 

[Dennyd]

Editing the feature scope like Shaggy18VW said is a very nice feature of SWX. I often create several assembly cuts (rather than use the static View, Display, Section view).

By default the feature scope of such a cut includes all unsuppressed parts and subassemblies at the time of the creation of the cut. This is important to note especially if you have a large assembly and you only want the cut to affect a select few parts. I often find it faster to first suppress everything I don't want affected by the cut before making the cut. For one thing I can find and understand everything easy in the Feature Manager Tree than in the list box of the feature scope.

Simpler is always better and faster. The assembly cut has to compute the resulting geometry for everything included in the cut feature. This includes all parts listed in the feature scope, even if they are not actually cut.

Use assembly cuts, but include in the feature scope only what needs to be cut, however you decide to control what is included in the feature scope.

- - -Dennyd

 

[JNR]

Ya know, speedy is right, they do all congregate at the end of the tree.. I don't use them, so I had fogotten that. However are they not still governed by normal parent/child rules thus depending somewhat on when they are created?

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.