"exploding" a sub-assembly in I-Deas 12

[cadcoke5]

I have an assembly that has a number of hand rails. Each hand rail is mounted with a bracket that is a sub-assembly of its own. Each of the brackets uses about 22 fastener parts.

I should also mention that the company's policy is for fasteners to be at the top level of major assemblies.

Rather than place each of the fasteners individually, I made a temporary assembly of the mounting bracket assembly and all the fasteners. Here is the general structure;

Platform Assembly
Platform Weldment
handrail
TemporayHandrailMountWithFasteners
Handrail Mount Bracket Assy
Screw 8Mx25
Bolt 8M
Washer 8M
Lock Washer 8M

The obvious method in I-Deas is to use the icon that "Changes the Parent of the selected instances." This does work, but I am finding it cumbersome to select all 22 fasteners in each bracket from the Hierarchy window. (the total number of brackets is 11, so there are 242 fasteners).

If I were using AutoCAD, the temporary assemblies would be a block, and I would simply "explode" those block, and then all the fasteners would no longer be part of that block.

This procedure may be a way to deal with Fastener stacks that need to be in my assembly. I think that the temporary assembly concept could be used by creating an assembly of the bolt, nut, & washer, and then later dissolving those assemblies (again, with the AutoCAD type "Explode").

Any suggestions on how best to do this procedure?

Joe Dunfee

 

[cadcoke5]

To update on what I have been doing with this;

I finally settled on copying one of the brackets and bolt collections off to the side of the main model. I made a few copies of that, and turned each of them to the correct orientation. Then, I would copy the group to the actual final positions.

Since this was a fresh copy, all of the items were placed at the bottom of the hirearchy list. With them at the bottom of the hirearchy list, it is fairly easy to re-select them multiple times.

Since they were off to the side, I could just draw a window to highlight the parts, but not the assemblies (the bracket itself is a weldment, which is done as an assembly). So, I must use the Hireararchy list to actually select all the times. But, having them all collected in sequence helped that alot.

I still wish I could just click or draw a window around items in my main assembly, and not have to mess with the hirearchy tree to select them. But, this doesn't seem to be possible.

Joe Dunfee

 

[SDETERS]

Look under the manage bings drop down you should see groups. You can group all of them instances together and just select them as a group. you can name the group when you go to select a group right click and use groups.

It takes a little bit up front work but works nice once you get them set up.