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Joined parts?

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tap90291

Mechanical
Aug 13, 2002
106
We have been having problems with large assemblies and in discussions with an overseas office using Solidworks their solution has been to create joined parts of subassemblies. Is this the best approach for this type of problem, what are the pro's and con's to this.

Thanks in advance.


TAP
 
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It depends on your requirements for the assembly. Is it for "show-n-go" or is it to share design information?

Rather than creating new joined parts, you can save (depending on SW version) your assemblies as SLDPRTs. This turns everything into surface models.

Or you can save your entire assembly as a parasolid file. This will output each part as a solid model, but the file size will be much smaller.

If the assembly needs to be a full parametric models, some discussion on this happened last month.

thread559-107220
thread559-107611

[green]"But what... is it good for?"[/green]
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
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You may also try creating simplified configurations for your assembly to suppress internal components that are not needed in a higher level assembly, thus reducing the load time of the assembly and faster rebuilds.

Jason Capriotti
Smith & Nephew, Inc.
 
The pro I found to using joined versus saving as a part is that the joined part will update with any changes made to the assembly. I haven't seen this with assemblies saved as part...unless I'm doing something wrong. The con to using join is that is can be quite cumbersome to create.
 
I have found in the past joined parts can seriuosly slow down rebuilds. I have used them creating multiple parts in Mould tool design with the Cavity command. Tread carefully here as I have many times had 30min-1hr rebuilds.

regards
 
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