best practice for adding a lot of fasteners?

[potrero]

NX5.0.5
I am trying to remember if there's an expedited way to add in a lot of the same type of fastener to an assembly.

As an example, if one has a plate with a series of holes in it, created with the new hole feature, referencing a sketch with all the centerpoints in it.

Is there a faster way than manually setting the constraints for each individual fastener?

I suppose "remembered constraints" will help, but is there an even faster way?

What about adding stacked fastener assemblies (ie: a bolt + a washer)?

Thanks.

 

[JohnRBaker]

While I know this won't help you now, but we are introducing a tool, as part of our NX 6 Reuse Library, which will automatically evaluated the holes in the components of an assembly and assign pre-configured 'fastener sets' based on the size, type and length of hole(s) found.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Andy512]

Is there any way to do this in NX5 "manually"

A "set" of components rather than an assembly of components?

The automatic function of NX6 sounds good but we spend a lot of time it seems adding and constraining the same weld stud, clamp, washer, and nut over and over.

All need to be children of the same master model so our parts list can show these in our specification drawing.

 

[DavidTolsma]

Another way to do it, is by creating datum plane and axis in the part(s) and created a reference set for mating. Then you'll make the plane and axis, not touching the solid. This also is good since mating surfaces reference surface IDs and those can change due to model changes.

-Dave Tolsma

http://Tolsnet.com/jobs

http://groups.google.com/group/NX_CAX/

http://groups.google.com/group/plm-exchange/

 

[hudson888]

While the post isn't specific much of the time you can look at the pattern layout of the fastener holes and identify one or more possible regular arrays whether they be circular or rectangular. In any such case your options are to add components as an array, with or without mating.

The dimensions of the array can be based on measurement expressions to include even more associativity.

If your hole pattern is modelled as feature array then you can chose to base your component array on its parameters.

We also use part families set under palletes for ease of finding the fasteners and within most common fastener types the mating method is set. So in the odd case when the pattern is non-uniform the dialog will stay within a cycle allowing you to step quickly through selecting the mating faces.

Basically if you do a lot of this kind of work setting up a few things will cut down on the time spent in these otherwise very tedious tasks.

Cheers

Hudson