Best way to utilize top down design for mating enclosure halves without having the Adv Asm Extension

[RBobroski]

So I'm designing a tool that has two clam shell halves to it. I designed the overall final product as a skeleton, and now I want to use this skeleton to propagate the geometry to the halves, however we do not have the advanced assembly extension here so copy/publish geometry is not available. What do you guys think would be the best way to go about this? Should I have the skeleton model as just a generic and then use a remove material extrude to split in half with two instances dictating which side was removed? Only thing about that is then each half carries a bunch of excessive data. This part is pretty ergonomic with a lot of surface merges and sweeps so it's not as easy as just selecting the outside profile as a skeleton to extrude and then go from there.

 

[3DDave]

How much is the license? That might be the cheapest way. Make sure to negotiate heavily to decrease the maintenance costs. If you watch PTCUser you might have noticed one guy had to hold out on maintenance for 3 years to get PTC to deal with him right.

Other than that, you might create the parts in the context of an assembly and use copy-paste from surfaces in the assembly to the parts.

Or try exporting the features as STEP or IGES and import them into the parts as dumb surfaces.

Also look to PTC Community as well.

http://www.ptcusercommunity.com

 

[RBobroski]

I wound up doing the following. I made the skeleton part file, and did two extrudes in a family table to split this in half. Then I made a design assembly with both skeleton halves and created parts in that assembly that will be the true halves, then did a merge/inheritance option so each half only has the data from that half. I wish I could do that but I can barely get my boss to buy me a calibrated caliper when I need it.

 

[3DDave]

I'm used to the full complement, so I can't tell if merge is part of AAX or not.

If you can't get the tools, look for a new job. Trust me. Not buying tools is a bad sign.