Best Practice for Handling Multiples of Similar Variations of Parts?

JoeORourke

Hey all,

I'm a hobbyist and an occasional user of OnShape coming from SketchUp. I would like to design something which has a lot of individual parts, most of which are the same but just vary in size. Specifically, I would like to design a rack to hold my combination wrenches with each wrench having it's own individual "nut". So I'd have a 9mm, 10mm, 11mm, etc. nut. Since the amount of nuts can quickly add up between metric and SAE, I'm wondering the best approach to create these individual parts to be put into the assembly. My initial approach is to have a part studio for each size, but this brings up the issue I described. I also tried using Transform and Linear functions to create multiple parts in the same Part Studio, but this seems to link all those individual parts together, i.e., changing the size of one part changes all of them. I do realize that there may be multiple approaches to do this, possibly using the same approach of Transform/Linear, perhaps I missed/forgot something from the Tutorials? I do remember from the tutorials that having a Part Studio for each part is not a best practice approach, so bear with me for this example. I remember Part Studio should essentially be each individual, unique part of the overall design and Assembly is where multiples of the same part should be inserted.

Document Link

Thanks,
Joe

jakeramsley

Sounds like a job for configurations.

Here is our self paced course on basic configurations: https://learn.onshape.com/courses/introduction-to-part-configurations

bradley_sauln

This would be a good use case for configurations. You can start to learn more by taking a look at our learning pathway for it: https://learn.onshape.com/learn/learning-path/onshape-configurations

billy2

We're putting partstudio concepts in a folder, then driving each concept  with configurations. Before changing a configuration, we branch the  concept partstudio allowing us to keep many workspaces showing permutation of each concept.

So we end up with: many concepts & many variations within each concept.

Working well for us. It's manageable and archival-able.

I believe this could work for you also,