Fasteners

Mike_Johnson

Is there any way of transferring fasteners and mates from a subassembly to a top level assembly?

Philip_Thomas_PTC

Mike - hello! I work here on the Product Management team and am interested in your question.

For the sake of public discussion:

• Why are you trying to move fasteners and mates to the top level? 
• Are these rivets? If yes, would you be willing (either publicly or privately) to describe the steps you would like to use in CAD to define their location and hole formation? I am specifically interested in the process where the rivets do not lay on flat faces.

No - today there is no magic feature that pulls fasteners and mates to the top level.

S1mon

There is a magic feature. It's just a little hidden, and requires creating another assembly.

This may or may not help with what you're trying to do, but at my company we found that it's nice to model subassemblies into an intermediated CAD assembly that we call a "kit". It includes mounting hardware or other parts which are closely related to the subassembly, but literally those parts should be part of the next level assembly. 

In the properties, you can set the subassembly BOM behavior to "show components only".

In the instance list it looks like this:


In the top level scooter BOM it looks like this:


So the "kit" doesn't show up in the BOM, but it makes it easier to add a kickstand to a scooter with one mate, but it adds an assembly and the two mounting screws.

These kits are not ever ordered or given drawings, but they make CAD work easy. We also have other kits which include doors or other parts which really don't get assembled until the final top level assembly, but design wise, they make sense to think about with their associated parts.