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Best practices on configurations and drawings
GAR_LucFurn
Member Posts: 3 PRO
I have a product that has 75-100 parts. It requires ~20-30 pages of 2D drawings to build it. The product is offered in ~20 sizes. My goal is to open an Onhape document, select the size needed, and then print out the 20-30 pages of drawings after the drawings update and dimension themselves. It's important to note the product is customized in various ways each time we build them. They are each given a serial number, and we need to save the final drawings for each serial number for future reference (i.e., replacement parts, troubleshooting, etc.)
I would love to hear your thoughts on the best practices for organizing our documents, part studios, assemblies, and drawings to accomplish all this. I realize this may be too broad a subject, if so I can try asking some specific questions. Or feel free to ask me what information you'd need to provide an opinion.
We've gone through so many different approaches, and I feel like we are so close and that OnShape is the right tool for this, but we are just not quite getting there. Currently, we have many sub-assembly documents that feed into a final assembly document and then into a final drawing document. But it seems clunky to open and close so many docus and enter and re-enter the size configurations so often. We were advised to create these sub-assemblies and different documents because the product was too complicated (i.e., there were too many parts/assemblies).
If we can figure out how to set up the models/documents and configurations in the most efficient structure, there has to be a way to do this in just a few clicks.
Thanks!
Answers
It's tedious to setup, and seems very clunky, but my first thought would be to pass through the part configuration settings to the assemblies, effectively creating a long chain of configurations that configure the parts as needed at the end.
And display states of each assembly where all other parts are hidden, so you can make drawings of parts from the assembly.
Then, you need only adjust the configuration of the assembly in the drawing and you're away.
Seems a ham handed approach but might work.
Thank you Oliver for sharing your thoughts on it. If we took that approach, would we have to change each of the part configurations when we wanted to print a new size? That seems it would be quite tedious as you mention.
Another thought … what if we kept all the art studios in their respective docs, added a top-level assembly of the finished product in another doc, and then made a final doc that would contain all the drawings in a template? Then, when we wanted to print a new set of drawings, we would first clone the drawing template doc, which will become the new serial number drawing doc that will be archived for future reference. We then "change the configuration" in each of the drawings of the serial number doc. If we did that, would the drawings "pull" all the updated and reconfigured assemblies and parts studios forward from the precedent documents?
Not necessarily, you can link them together. Eg: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2bbd5916b24e39603c3bd6a4/w/dfe23296b64db53c98ad2bb6/e/5d548bd37f05bf658d68e1bc?renderMode=0&uiState=66e847fef0332f717ed3a1a9
The trick is to sort your sheets by reference, then you can change the configuration on all sheets at once:
Hopefully someone else has a better way to do this though, because it sure seems like a horribly hacky way to do this - definitely not at all an intended workflow to have drawings of parts via a display state in an assembly.
Ah Ok, that is new and could be helpful. THanks again!
Hi @GAR_LucFurn
What kinds of drawings are you talking about—just part drawings for manufacturing or also assembly drawings like exploded views? Don’t you still need a lot of manual effort to create these drawings?
It will not be a quick process but I +1 for Oliver's comments for building the assembly up and passing the configuration through to each subassembly etc.
One thing to consider is, that if you are suppressing/unsuppressing components between configurations, you will still need to go back in and add/delete balloons, or related dimensions after the document updates. The linked BOM balloon would get an error if the part became suppressed. This would not be the case if it is just dimensions which change. To get around this you would need to have multiple models/drawing sets without any suppressed components.
You can create a feature script which can generate serial numbers based on inputs like length, width and height.
^^ Sorry, feature scripts are only for part level and not assemblies.Please also see this post:
Seems currently, configurations are primarily focused on individual parts and assemblies, with limited ability to manage global variables or configurations across multiple documents.
This is a problem I have encountered numerous times. It seems like using configurations ends up causing some kind of breakage more often than not. I'm at the point where I'm just about ready to stop trying to use them, but the team lead is very attached to the concept. They've been the biggest cause of headaches for us, though. I'm completely reworking and rebuilding all of our machines right now because the original models got too tangled the way he had them set up. Personally, I'd rather work around configurations with branches or duplicates.
Configurations in Onshape are so much better than the equivalent in Creo or Solidworks. They are super powerful and flexible. Managing things in a top down assembly, especially with multiple levels, does take more work than I would like sometimes, but it's very doable.