MTD and TG1-Is it useful?

[jopal]

We have been designing molds at my company for years now with our own made mold templates, patterns etc. We recently purchased a new license which now has mtd included it in. Is there anything useful in it that I can incorparate into my current templates, or is there any functions that I should look at that may save me time. We have PKT, KWA so our templates are fairly advanced.

 

[Azrael]

You probably have noticed that if you insert mold components (a quite decent component library is also supplied) with MTD that it will automatically drill the hole needed in all plates. That functions can be used for other stuff, so check the the function called "drill component.."

I have seen demonstrations made with this function that are quite interesting, the example I saw was using a catalog with standard part, this case ball bearings, after the ball bearing was positioned this function was called and it removed material on a housing to seat the ball bearing. Looking closer on the ball bearing part I noticed that it used negative solid with predefined naming what this function used. In the same demonstation they inserted a key on an axle and after this function we could see a slightly oversized hole in the length direction according to the std.

maybe helpful?

 

[jopal]

I did notice the drill component feature, but I noticed it will only remove material based on 2 features - with drill hole or with Tap hole. So i assume if my negative solid in my pattern has one of these to names, it should work. I would have to do alot of re-work on my templates as we mostly use boolean remove as opposed to assemble negative body (None of our holes to remove are negative solids), but down the road could be huge time savings.

 

[DBezaire]

We use PKT, KWA and KWE and at one time had MTD. We dropped MTD back in the 32bit days due to lack of functionality. It has some handy features but you will need lots of RAM and storage space (if on Smarteam). Out of the box Catia MTD will beat the PKT/KWA route for startup and implementation but since you have fairly advanced templates I would look into adding in knowledge patterns, more UDFs and definitely scripting. I find our process and templates are more efficient than MTD saving us update and load time.


Win XP64
R20/21, 3DVIA Composer 2012, ST R20
Dell T7400 16GB Ram
Quadro FX 4800 - 1.5GB

 

[jopal]

I'm not very familiar with KWE. I wish I could introduce scripting but I don't have the resource to do this, and I cannot scrip myself. I don't think I would be using anything out of MTD anyway but my boss asked me since we have it, to investigate if there is any use for it.

 

[DBezaire]

KWE enforces company standards, I use mostly KWA. If you get some time, Mike Berry set up a website as an intro to scripting. Very informative, great tips.

http://v5vb.wordpress.com/

Ferdo compiled this gem -- CATIA_Portable_Script_Center_v2.0.chm

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=251808

This is where I started and I am just a junior.


Win XP64
R20/21, 3DVIA Composer 2012, ST R20
Dell T7400 16GB Ram
Quadro FX 4800 - 1.5GB

 

[KevinDeSmet]

That's the funny thing about CATIA, scripting seems to be fairly popular, so you may find more resources to help you out than you might initially think.

Certified SolidWorks Professional