Solidworks Part To Assembly

[Lalo Scalf]

WhatI would like to have is a single "dumb" solid in the single part

that represents my assembly.I should state that I used both the process of creating a part from an

assembly via the "join" feature as well as the simpler method of using

the "Save As" a part from the assembly stage.Thanks for any help in advance.

Thanks for the feedback.I tried the shell option; I assume you are describing the exterior

surfaces option. That does decrease the ability to see what is going

on but instead of having X "dumb" solids in the part I have X 'dumb"

surfaces. Its better but I not exactly what i was looking for.My join option does not have the ability to apply a scale factor.

Maybe it's because we are still using 2007. As for the creating a

block inside, I can do that on piece parts, which I have already done

on some of the parts, but that still gives the customer a BOM of the

assembly.It might not be possible to get a single "dumb" solid in the part.

Looks like the fourms are acting up again. Anyway, just in case the

post didn't go thru, here's whatcha do: Save the Assembly as a part,

making sure you pick the option to only save as external surfaces.

Then open the part and save as iges or whatever.Matthew Lorono

Join does not scale in and of itself of course. But since a join feature

resides in a newly created part there is no reason you cannot add a

scale feature after the join. You can also use delete face to remove any

features that you think are not needed by the recipient.I believe delete face will work with the exported external surfaces. I

have had trouble with external surfaces capturing everything correctly

so I don't often use it.Sometimes when looking forward to when I need to give a model to a

customer for interface purposes I will create a simple interface model

that I use in the assembly as an envelope part. I can give this model to

anyone interfacing with my assembly and know that we are both working of

the same music.TOP

Bob at att.net, Phil at tagaerospace.com is correct. My company

provides small mechanisms (latches, release mechanisms, hinges, etc.)

to larger companies building a spacecraft (Lockheed, NGST, JPL, etc.)

During the design phase of the program, the designer enigneers at

these larger companies opt to purchase small mechanisms from other

companies due to cost, schedule, and heritage reasons. Since "real

estate" on these S/C is in high dermand it is nice for them to be able

to drop in a high fidelity CAD model of the mechanism they plan to

baseline in their overall design.Thanks again!

It took longer than I expected for me to determine a "simple" solution for the following issue since there is a lack of documentation in this area, so hopefully someone out there finds this post useful.

After realizing the benefits of having Upchain recognize individual part/assembly configurations in SolidWorks as separate items, I had Upchain Support enable this in my tenant. However, I didn't realize that Upchain wouldn't allow me to provide my own item names for these configurations during the item creation process. Because of this, multiple configurations within a part/assembly end up having the same item name displayed in the various BOMs - which is not as useful as I'd hoped.

Until the Upchain developers enable the ability to input item names during the item creation process, the simplest solution I have come up with was to create a new configuration-specific custom property (which I simply called "Name") within my SolidWorks part/assembly templates and map it to "Item Name" within Upchain. Now when Upchain sees an entry for this custom property, it is displayed as Item Name; if there is no entry, then it resorts to original file name of the part/assembly.

Hi AllenKey, thank you for your message. By default, Upchain takes the item name from the file name upon registration. It does this regardless of whether SW Configs are enabled or not. You may then subsequently update the item name once the item is created as you normally would with any item attribute. To help you do this, there are several tools available to know what configuration you're looking at:

Can someone tell me why when one part of an assembly of two parts has the ability to pivot is brought into an assembly with another part, it loses it's ability to pivot. I get a message that "it is fully defined and cannot move".

I am attaching the fork and pivot to a base. The message is that everything is "fully defined and fixed".. My question is how do I unfix the fork and pivot so that it has the ability to move up and down? Right click does not not give me the option to release it.

thank you so much for your reply and your information. The technique did not work, however I may have mate issues, which may be the reason for it not working. If you would be good enough to let me have the second option, I would be most grateful.

In model of assemly B which include assembly A, you right click on assembly A, chose Component properties ( It is on the top right conner of new windows ). In Component properties you check in Flexible ( Default is Rigid ) and OK. Then parts of assembly A are unfixe. Hope it can solve your problem

To insert parts into an assembly, it is like moving files into a folder: you drag and drop straight from file folders or from using the Insert Component Command in the CommandManager on the Assembly tab. With this command, you find parts in your folders and then insert them by clicking to place them.

When you start a new assembly directly from a part, the part is put at your cursor for you to place aligned with the assembly origin. To place a part on the assembly origin, simply confirm the Insert Components Property Manager without clicking within the Graphics Area. You can also show the assembly origin and snap your cursor to the origin in the Graphics Area.

This is very important for design intent. If you know or are going to learn anything about GD&T, basing designs off their intended design origin is important for design changes, tolerances, and avoiding assembly errors as well. Origin placement is also key in getting center of mass measurements correct for mechanical design and for succeeding on the CSWA exam.

For this exercise, we will start modeling the CAE1000 assembly using the parts we have previously created. To do this exercise and the future exercises in this chapter of the text, you will need all the CAE1000 parts which are linked here in a zip folder for convenience.

In this article, we will show you the steps to convert a SOLIDWORKS Multibody Part file into a SOLIDWORKS Assembly File. The steps listed below can be useful when creating Molds as you can easily model everything at the Part level, and then move to the Assembly drawing to simply create your annotations.

Select Browse under Create Assembly. This will open the Save-As Dialog (Figure 7). When you create the assembly, select the check box Derive Resulting Parts from Similar Bodies or Cut List to condense your cut list. This option finds multiple instances of similar bodies for your assembly Bill of Material.

When you open the newly created Assembly File (Figure 10), you will see each part file has an external reference back to the original multibody part file. Each Part file can be used to create detailed part drawings and the assembly can be used to generate an Assembly Drawing, complete with a Bill of Materials and Exploded Views.

In the example below I have two parts, yellow and gray, and when adding an assembly fillet feature, Solidworks adds it to the gray part. I'd like to treat the grey cylinder as if it were part of the yellow part for the purposes of creating a fillet between them, and then propagate that fillet to the gray part. The second image shows what I'd like to achieve, but between two assembly parts instead of two part features.

That's assuming the fillet you're generating is going to be complicated. In most practical cases I would probably just extrude or revolve a simplified fillet onto the gray part by manually drawing it.

It is a common practice to export a SOLIDWORKS assembly to a neutral file format to be imported in other CAD applications. The option to save SOLIDWORKS assembly as a part may not be as widely used, but it can be useful when assembly file set needs to be reduced to a single file and used for representation only. Saving assembly as a part eliminates the need for sending all the reference files.

Similar to exporting assembly to a neutral file format, a part saved from an assembly includes plain geometry without feature history. After an assembly has been saved to a part file, there is no link between the two documents. Further changes made to the assembly will not propagate to the part file.

If you want your new project to link to some of the original files (standard brackets for example) you can untick them in the file listing and your copied project will still link to the original brackets, which is really handy for standard parts.

This works in a similar way to Pack and Go but with an improved interface allowing greater visibility of what you have configured already and also making it easier to make changes to small groups of files by using the filter tools.

If you have PDM Professional, you can also use the power of serial numbers to give all selected files a new serial number at the click of a button making it very quick to renumber your assembly components.

Have any of you tried to get part/assembly bounding boxes via SW Document Manager? Is there a way to get the tessellation data, that can then be used to calculate a bounding box? If I need to, I can have my guys insert bounding box features into their files prior to checking in. This would then automatically insert the bounding box custom properties. Now that I think about it, this might be the best option, as I also need to take configurations into account. Anywho, DM will be able to get these custom properties, and I can be on my merry way.

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