Assembly weight management.

[SiW979]

I've battled and battled with assembly weight management, especially when working with WAVE linked parts that double up in weight column in the ANT and make the overall weight of the assembly incorrect. Whilst it can be done, using assmebly weight management is a pain and asserting a value on a component is assembly specific.

What I've found is that the weight shown in the ANT is not referenced anywhere else, the weight on our drawing borders certainly does not come from there so am I missing something? as I'm thinking of advising my users to completely ignore the weight column and use on the Analysis > Mass Properties (the reason being that someone sent some information to an Indian supplier and gave them weight from the ANT which was 120kg to much and we were overcharged accordingly for that weight in the delivery). The other thing I want to ask does Assembly weight management get any better in NX5/6

Best regards

Simon (NX4.0.4.2 MP4 - TCEng 9.1.3.6.c)

http://www.jcb.com

 

[hudson888]

Simon,

I need to re-test some of this stuff in NX-5. And I'll touch on some stuff that you may think is irrelevant to do with part lists but you need to handle it to avoid making that task more difficult that it might be down the track.

You can manage the part list so that it reports masses and the weights of the individual items are in fact correct. But it will not as far as I've ever seen report masses of sub-assemblies. They usually list with a big fat zero alongside their item. Still the same in NX-5 .

You can create a mass measurement expression based on selected components and place that by reference onto the face of the drawing. Be careful in doing so as in earlier versions there were problems with such practices where the assembly if it could not find and load a component necessary to the calculation would refuse to open. In NX-5 you just get a friendly warning.

The practice of loading linked parts directly under those which use the wave linked geometry is not necessary to the functionality. So you could create the links elsewhere in a layout to avoid the double ups. I've seen this done but I'd rather not if it could be avoided.

But I'd simply try suppressing the wave linked components to see if that solves your problems. The suppression appears to work well enough to me after brief testing. I will state here that I'm unsure of whether using suppression works equally well in teamcenter or is properly supported for the creation of JT files for Visualization. But for weight calculations and part lists it seems to have the desired effect.

Otherwise and I know we've history on this and it does not perhaps suit your needs, but using promotions where appropriate does alleviate some of these problems.

Anyway that's about the size of it

Cheers

Hudson

 

[SiW979]

Hi Hudson

Thanks for your reply. Hmmm? weight management in NX4 is pretty dire and whenever I've spoke to Siemens they just seem to umm and arr, mutter a little and change the subject. It just seems very poorly put together and in some cases very difficult to get the correct results. Anyway, here's hoping that it gets better in later releases.



Best regards

Simon (NX4.0.4.2 MP4 - TCEng 9.1.3.6.c)

http://www.jcb.com

 

[hudson888]

Simon,

There are those who customize to good effect, and I'll leave you with that thought that it is possible to desire certain functionality which the product out of the box does not cater for. I think that given and advanced assemblies license you're able to achieve a bit more.

Cheers

Hudson

 

[uwam2ie]

...assemby weightmanagement / assembly Clearance...
is connected to the Model referenz set. Look in your details, componets what is on the reference set model.

 

[hudson888]

Yes Good Point,

If you do want to do this presumably just for your drawings you could create reference set/s in your parts/assemblies comprising the selected components to the exclusion of those which are only there as parents of linked geometry. I didn't mention this partly because I forgot to, but also because I don't much like to. There are problems to be had maintaining reference sets in assemblies that could be done without. But you're welcome to try it and find the best way for you.

Best Regards

Hudson