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How to handle multiple materials on one part
In the plastics sector, it happens that a part consists of several materials:
- Hard component with molded soft component (different geometry areas)
- Base polymer and masterbatch (material compound)
How do you manage these scenarios in Onshape? Hard component and soft component could be managed as separate parts. However, these would then have to have a common part number and not be considered separately. When it comes to material compounds, I currently have no idea.
Background:
The materials used are relevant for compliance and must be traceable.
I am grateful for suggestions!
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qty name material
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material 2
material 3
4 screw material
1 housing material
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However, if I want to output the mass in the BOM, only "no value" is displayed there.
Did someone know how to get the mass into the BOM?
Maybe you can get creative about having an assembly and composite part depending on your needs?
That said, I've definitely done this the other way (multi-body as a single part) in Solidworks some times. It really depended on the project and the needs of how we wanted to manage the BOM and drawings.
A part which has multiple materials is an "inseparable assembly". It could be a multi-shot injection molding, a weldment, a PCBA, sheetmetal with PEMs, etc... If there are parts which make up the inseparable assembly which might be shipped from one sub-supplier to another, then it makes a lot of sense to use an assembly and have part numbers for each piece. If all the assembly happens in one place, especially from raw materials, it could make more sense to use a single composite part. It really depends on what you need to order, track, inspect, etc. Also keep in mind repairs, refurbishment, CAPAs (corrective and protective actions), etc.
If you define a material for the parts that are components of a Composite part, the Mass properties tool will report the mass of this Composite part as the sum of the masses of the component parts of the Composite part.
However, a Computed mass property will not be calculated for the Composite part itself. Hence, the Mass column in the BOM will not report the mass of the Composite part nor the Properties dialog of the Composite part will report a Computed mass property.
There is an improvement request for this and I have added you to it.
To work around this issue, you have a couple options:
1. Define a material for the Composite part. This will effective override the previous mass calculation of this Composite part (the sum of the masses of the component parts) and define a mass based on the material assigned to the Composite part.
The computed mass property of this Composite part will also be calculated based on the assigned material and reported in the BOM.
I would recommend you to do this if the material of all the components of the Composite parts is the same.
The computed mass property of this Composite part will also be calculated based on the assigned material and reported in the BOM.
I would recommend you to do this if the material of all the components of the Composite parts is the same.
2. Override the Computed mass property value of the Composite part on the Properties dialog and manually assign the sum of the masses of all component parts.
The main disadvantage of this method is that you will have to manually update this override value if the mass of the component parts changes.
Unfortunately, redefining the Composite part as a Subassembly will yield similar results since computed properties are not yet available for assemblies. I will add you to this other improvement request on a separate ticket.
I think retaining their colors would be nice. You can always add surface colors as an additional step. A lot of my composite parts are huge and re-colorizing them after composing, it's a lot of work.
Either way I agree more control would be nice, incidentally if you haven't use the "part color" custom feature, it doesn't solve your problem but it's pretty handy, especially if you want to configure colors!
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/d997b0ffc30f659113b10c00/v/f17c7778c244710b6817a021/e/b6db0c9545b9a2df1d7ea546?jumpToIndex=828&showReturnToWorkspaceLink=true