Hi all,

This is my first topic here. I read the forums, but I never asked before.

In my company, we work with solidworks since 2016. We design and manufacture refrigerated truck bodies and we are having some troubles about our assemblies.

The assemblies are not difficult to create or mate, but we want to improve our use of Solidworks to achieve better assemblies. By the moment, we use a bottom-up approach, because 90% of our parts are cubes and the others are from our suppliers. We have our products and we customize each body for each client.

We don't use a top-down approach, because when the measures change the lineal patterns are modified and we have to add or remove some parts. Then we are thinking about doing Skeletons for Bottom-up assemblies, to add mates between part and sketch or planes and not between part faces in the assemblies.

When we start a new body, now we pack & go a body and modify it for the project, but if you have to modify a linear pattern you can have problems because you can break mates.

For design purpose we could do our assemblies easily, but for our manufacturing process we cannot simplify the CAD Models to automatize them.

Do you think a skeleton for this purpose could be a good idea?

Do you think it is a better idea have a SSP or a skeleton built in the assembly?

Thank you all.