Sharing information with assemblers

[grunt58]

Just curious how everyone provides information for their assemblers. Right now we have an extra seat of SolidWorks which we let our assemblers build from. It's on a machine that has no permissions to save to the server so there are no over writing problems. We don't build complex assemblies so this has worked well so far. We've tried Edrawings which seems slow and cumbersome, perhaps we are doing something wrong. We've also tried SolidView but it shows parts hidden in SolidWorks assemblies. Just seeing if there are better ways to share information. We need to be able to open a 3D model have some sort of component tree and the ability to take measurements.

Thanks

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[ctopher]

It seems to me that having assemblers work with actual models is asking for problems.
Have you looked at 3DVia? I suggest having the SW designers create the job travelers for the assemblers to use.

Chris
SolidWorks 11
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[JMirisola]

Exploded view?

Jeff Mirisola
My Blog

 

[frusso110]

We make assembly drawings. Exploded views are cool. I didn't know not making drawings was a thing in the industry!

 

[grunt58]

We don't charge for our design service. So we try to reduce the amount of drawings created. Assembly drawings is one we feel that is not needed for our purpose. Again we don't make complex assemblies so our assemblers can just build from our 3D models. We've been working this way for 5+ years now with no problems. As I stated in my first post our assembly people can not save our SolidWorks files they can only view them. This is set by permissions on the server. I'm just seeing what alternatives to Edrawings there are. It seems silly for our assemblers to have a $5k CAD file viewer. We are growing and will eventually need the SW seat back.

Certified SolidWorks Associate
SW2009 X64 SP 5.1
Dell Precision T5500
Nvidia Quadro 4000
Xeon 2.27GHz Quad Core, 6GB RAM
XP Pro X64 SP2.0

 

[MadMango]

PDF? Save as JPEG? Dump images into PowerPoint or Word?

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of these Forums?

 

[SnowCrash]

3D pdf is a nice option, but memory intensive. We share with outside resources using efiles mostly. You can make featureless bodies and assemblies if you want to hide the details. (tools>defeature)


--
Hardie "Crashj" Johnson
SW 2011 SP 4.0
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[Updraft]

One thing you can do is take the assemblies, explode them in the order of assembly, and animate the explosion. You can save this as an avi file and send that to the assemblers.

eDrawings is really perfectly suited for your situation. "Slow and cumbersome" usually is a familiarity problem that is solved with experience. If they are currently able to handle the files with SWX, i.e., the hardware is fast enough, then the same hardware is more than suitable for eDrawings. Getting used to the eDrawings options and controls is a tiny subset of what they (unnecessarily) have available to them in SWX assembly files. eDrawings should actually be better for the assemblers since they do not have as many options and choices to wade through. Besides, they can still measure and mark-up if you enable those capabilities.

- - -Updraft

 

[JMarv]

Try taking the SolidWorks assembly and saving it as a eDrawings assembly (*.easm). I've found eDrawings to be less cumbersome that way.

Joe
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