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Help Making Configurable Tube

Kyler_WalkerKyler_Walker Member Posts: 183 PRO
I regularly rely on configurable parts to make changes in higher level assemblies without breaking mates.  I have configured many parts and generally understand how to do so.  However, I am struggling to figure out what the best architecture would be for creating a configurable tube.  The properties that need to be configured are OD, wall thickness, and length.  Ideally, I would like to configure material too.  The part numbers need to be dependent on OD and wall thickness (and material if it's configured), but not length.  Part numbers could depend on length if by the way of showing the length after a hyphen at the end of the part number, but I don't think Onshape allows this.  Anyway, I would like to see the length in some form in a BOM.  At this point, I have pretty much given up the idea of making material configurable because my available wall thicknesses are material dependent and Onshape doesn't allow configuration options to depend on higher level configuration inputs.  This is unfortunate because it means I will lose mates if I want to change my tube material.  To get the length to display in my BOM, I have tried making a custom property called "Length."  I can manually set this property for discrete lengths in the configured properties table, but I can't seem to make it a continuous function of a configuration variable.  The Frame feature seems to get part way to solving the length display problem.  At least it provides a way to see how long a tube is, but I can't figure out how to display its "Length" property without making a Cut List in a drawing.  I would really like to see the length in a BOM.  Also, the Frame feature would require me to configure the combination of OD and wall thickness, which I don't want. I would like OD and wall thickness to be independent inputs. 

If anyone has any creative ways of solving these problems, I would really appreciate hearing them.  I think that for a part, such as a tube, that has no topological changes between its variants, I should be able to create any variant by configuring one part.

Thanks!

Answers

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