How to model machined castings in NX?

[acciardi]

Hello all:

I'm a new NX4 user. I haven't had the formal training yet so I'm just kind of winging my way through. I have 14 years of Pro/E experience, and I've been pretty successful at modeling a 200+ feature casting in the "Pro/E" way, ie; no primitives or direct face modeling - just sketched based features. I must say I am very impressed with the flexibilty of NX, unlike Pro's "My way or the highway" approach.

I am stuck though - we model our castings as a seperate part from the finished machined part, and the machined casting has historically been created by bringing the casting model in as an "inheritance feature", then adding the holes, spotfaces, flycuts etc as new features in the machined model. This method gets you 2 models. When the casting is updated, the changes automatically propogate to the machined part, but the machined features do not affect the cast part.

So my question is - what is the equivelant method of doing this in NX? I've read a few notes about using WAVE to link the geometry, but not enough detail on how to actually do it. I've also noted that some problems have been reported in using Wave with TC.

Note that I could make the machined features as assembly cuts, but I believe that NX has to have a way to do it with using the casting geometry as the reference or first feature of a new part.

If there are any notes that address this, I'd appreciate a pointer.

Thanks and best regards,

Ed Acciardi

 

[JohnRBaker]

If you wish to have two totally separate part files, the approach to take is to open an empty part file and add, as an assembly component, your casting part. Now create a new part file which will eventually contain your machined model. Add this as a component at the same level as the other component. In other words, you now have an assembly with 2 first level components. Now set the second component (the currently empty "machined" part) to be the work part with the top level assy still as the displayed part. Now go into Insert/Associative Copy/WAVE Geometry Linker... and with your selection set to "Body", select the casting and hit OK. Now save all you files.

At this point you can close all but the machined part. What you will have is a "WAVE-linked" body that you can proceed to add features to which represent the material that will be removed by the various NC operations. Once this is done and you've saved your model, you can now make changes to the original casting, and to get the machined part to update, all you need to do is open both the casting and machined part in the same session, either by opening the original "holding" assy or by just opening the 2 parts at one time.

There are some other things that you can do, but this should get you started.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product "Evangelist"
NX Product Line
UGS Corp
Cypress, CA
Phone: 714-952-6032
FAX: 714-952-5758
John.R.Baker@ugs.com

 

[acciardi]

Thanks John, that works like a charm and is *exactly* what I was looking for.

This method is roughly analogous to the "part merge" approach in Pro, where you create a temporary assembly in which you merge the source and destination geometry together.

Much obliged.

Ed Acciardi
Seagate Corp

 

[ewh]

John,
Why do you need to have two components? Can't you add the casting as a component in the machined model, and do a wave link there?

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yes, you can work either way (in fact, there are a couple of other approaches one could take as well). What I like about my approach, despite it resulting in an extra file, is that the two parts, the casting and machined models, are totally separated from each other. This allows a little extra flexibilty with respect to where you can move the models since you don't have to worry about assembly links between the parts (the WAVE links, contrary to what some might think, have nothing to do with the assembly structure).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product "Evangelist"
NX Product Line
UGS Corp
Cypress, CA
Phone: 714-952-6032
FAX: 714-952-5758
John.R.Baker@ugs.com