As Welded / As Machined Configurations ?

stephen_santarossa

Other CAD system allows me to make a "configuration" (and drawing) of a part "as welded", and another configuration (and drawing) of the machining operations.

Similarly I may have a Flame-Cut configuration of a steel plate, to send to my steel vendor, and a machining configuration and drawing to send to my toolroom.

How is this handled in Onshape ?

john_mcclary

There are no configurations (Yet)

But the accepted work around is to use branches or versions

john_mcclary

There are no configurations (Yet)

But the accepted work around is to use branches or versions

philip_thomas

Stephen - the 'As Cast' / 'As Machined' case is a very common one and there is a solution that works very well if you are aware of the 'cost'.
The solution is the use of 'derived'.
In part studio1 you would create (or import) the 'As Cast' state.
In part studio 2 you derive the part from PS1 and continue with the machining operations ("As Machined")
You can now create drawings of each step and they are associative one to another.

What is the catch? 
Derive is 'expensive' in that when a 'derive' is encountered in a feature list, the rebuild jumps to the parent part studio feature list and rebuilds ALL OF IT (even if there are parts generated by the feature list that have not been derived). If it's short and only creates that one part,  it's quite quick. "With great power comes great responsibility"

PeteYodis

stephen_santarossa  Another possible method is to model the "as welded" geometry in one part studio, and then derive that into an "as machined" part studio where you perform your machined features.  Any changes from the "as welded" part studio would be available in the "as machined" part studio.  These part studios could be within the same document, or they could be in different documents (linked).  One advantage of these part studios being in different documents is for sharing purposes.  You may not want people you share the "as welded" design to be able to access the "as machined" design and vice versa - the linked document approach gives you that option.

Many users of file based systems struggled with the use of configurations to manage more than one part number - particularly in the context of a PDM system where versioning and revisions were only ever at the file level and never at the more needed granular level of the configuration.  For that reason, many shied away from configurations in this scenario.

john_mcclary

@philip_thomas
Thank you for explaining how derived parts are calculated. I'll try to keep that at a minimum from now on.

PeteYodis

Looks like @philip_thomas and I tagged teamed this at the same time.

Using derived from a linked document also has an advantage of being able to defer the performance impact until you are ready to get the updated geometry - it's much akin to pressing the update button in a drawing to get updated view geometry.