automated part location on drawing

[proEdj]

Hello Everyone,

Has anyone came across a code that reads where parts exist on an a pro-e assembly drawing then can output that grid zone into a table in the BOMS? When I say grid I am refering to the numbers along the bottom and the letters on the side of a drawing that divide a drawing into zones.

Thanks,

Dane

 

[ajack1]

You might be better asking on the pro-e site

 

[Tunalover]

preEdJ:
Unless you plan on ballooning each find number only once in the entire drawing, what you are proposing to do is probably impractical. In even a relatively simply assembly, you may call out, say, M2.5 washers in five different places (each place having its own sheet and zone number). Are you proposing, then, that the BOM will identify all five zones where the washers are called out? That could be a very big BOM, assuming that you can figure out a way to make a parametric link automatically update the BOM in the first place.

Why would you want to do this anyway? Do you need to "hand hold" your manufacturing folks? Recall that a drawing should not be "bastardized" into a Work Instruction (sorry, but here I go onto my soap box again!). By doing so, you tailor the drawings to one set of people. Also, by making the drawing so process-intensive, you:

A. Stifle the creativity of those building the product by "tying their hands" into doing it only one way.

B. Tailor the documentation to only one set of characters. What if the manufacturing activity is moved (e.g. outsourced) or changed (e.g. a consolidation or takeover where the entire group may be changed). The new folks will gripe and complain and your costs WILL be high.

C. Make the drawings so detailed and process-dependant that you will be changing them "until the cows come home."


Tunalover

 

[proEdj]

Tunalover,

I think you raise a good point about reoccurring parts, such as washers, that could be overwhelming. I have heard of many companies using a "stop order" within their codes such that once 3 parts with the same item number are recognized then this item number will be skipped, and the cell in the boms will be left blank. I think this would take care of your initial concern.

As far tying the hands of manufacturing, I am making no attempt to specify any process. I am only allowing a viewer to quickly look at the part list and say "oh, this part exist in G-7....and there it is...that was convenient." Please elaborate how I am forcing the manufacturing folks to do anything.

proEdj

 

[ajack1]

ProEdj, I do not work with Pro-e but face similar problems to you.

Firstly I totally agree with you in how you are trying to lay out your drawings, we often have ten sheets of GA, sections and exploded views and fifty of itemised part drawings, to expect the guys on the shop floor to wade through them to find each part is poor IMO, it is not telling them how to make the part.

We have an option called auto balloon on our system but to be honest it usually makes such a mess it is not worth using. We also face the problem of having say ten parts the same but at different angles and height, to produce them as 2D drawings from the model you have to do a lot of editing and if you auto update drawings they all return, or you bastardise the drawing, which in itself is not good, but usually the option we take.

I just assumed other systems handled this better than ours, I would be interested to hear how others overcome this problem as well as yours, good luck.

 

[drawoh]

ajack1,

I am on SolidWorks. I suspect that SW has an automatic explode feature, but I have never considered trying to find it or figure it out.

Engineering drawings are our primary means of communication with the fabricators, inspectors and assemblers. There are other ways, but these are unofficial, unreproducible by others within the company, and uncontrolled by things like ECRs and revisions.

You know stuff that production needs to know. In every possible sense, good drafting is like good writing. If you know what you are talking about, if you understand your priorities, if you are organized in presenting it, if you understand what the reader does or does not understand clearly, you will succeed in communicating. There is no way around having a person think about this stuff.

Break the assembly down into steps or even into sub-assemblies. Write up an assembly procedure in Microsoft Word. If you name views on the drawing, you have a clear way to reference them from your document. If the assembly procedures you are writing up are dumb, you can fix your design.

One of my projects for a rainy day is to create an assembly procedure website for something. 3D CAD makes it easy to generate colour graphics, exploded and otherwise. The HTML code allows hyperlinking with standards and in-house procedures. The main problem I see is version control, particularly of the CAD views. Writing HTML with a text editor like NOTEPAD is dead easy, especially if someone generates a proper style sheet.

Consider alternate approaches to what you are doing. A long time ago, I learned to do tabular dimensioning in AutoCAD. This was a convenient way to present dimensions on parts with a lot of dimensioned features. When I switched to SolidWorks, I found that tabular dimensioning was no longer possible. I quickly realized that I could do multiple views of the same feature. The first one showed the outline. The second one showed the 4-40UNC tapped holes. The third one showed the 10-32UNF helicoils, etc. This is a bad procedure on a drafting board or on 2D CAD. It is perfectly harmless on parametric CAD, and it makes the information clear, just like tabular dimensioning.

JHG

 

[ajack1]

Thanks drawoh, some real food for thought there.

We changed systems about 6 months ago for ease of transfer between departments and we all now run the same system, this helps greatly as it has a full feature recognition, so the CNC “knows” that a taped hole for example is a certain size and depth and through face colour standards we now show all faces that require machining and to what level. We have far from perfected this and our standards are constantly evolving, but we are getting there, with no major faux pas to date.

The one thing I am no closer to solving is multiple parts, say you have 15 keys all at different angles, to have them come up on the BOM as 15 off they have to be on the same layer, if they are on the same layer they all print “as one” this is no good for a drawing. So you either just draw it as in AutoCAD and it is not associative and does not come up on the BOM, or you have 15 different layers and 15 different parts on the BOM. There are other ways we have tried.

Whatever we do there are three good reasons to do it and one very good reason not to. It is becoming a real pain in the rear, I would be interested to hear how others overcome this problem, or if other systems just allow you to show 1 part of 15 but have 15 off on the 2D drawings and BOM.