Saving Assembly Files as Parts

[SWKennedy]

I know this is going to possibly be a fairly open ended question, but I was curious as to what the assemblies/computers go through when saving to a part.

We have fairly considerably sized models with thousands of parts, most of them located in routing sub-assemblies. Occasionally when we save those assemblies as a part (which we do to send to a customer), it'll take an hour or two. Other times we've left them saving over a weekend only to see them complete just before lunch on monday.

All of our computers are working over a network, same settings, same hardware (x64 windows xp, 3.2GHz Xeon Quad core processors, 8GB Ram, nVidia Quadro FX 4800 video cards with up to date drivers from solidworks). We've specifically attempted to just save as a part straight from the network assembly (all three options: exterior faces, exterior components, and all components), we've tried saving as a parasolid and then to a part (again all three options), but they all end in the same result where it takes hours/days to get the finished part file to save.

Are we just pushing our limits trying to save these large assemblies as parts, is there a better way to create a customer usable file?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Save all sub-assys as parts, re-create TL assy with those parts, then if necessary save that assy as a part.

 

[Eltron]

Working over a network immediately throws up flags. Have you tried bringing the assy over to a local machine then performing the same operation?

Dan

http://www.eltronresearch.com

Dan's Blog

 

[SWKennedy]

Try to remove the network out of the equation was our intent when we saved them as parasolids. We saved them on our local machines and then opened them from there and tried to save them as a part. We had the same result saving on our local machines just as a solidworks assembly, IGES and STEP file as well.

 

[TheTick]

Why are you saving as part? To send elsewhere? WHy not just send parasolid then?

 

[SWKennedy]

I believe it was so a customer got a single part to open up instead of a file that generated an assembly and thousands of extra smaller part files.