I am attracted to the use of Smart fasteners as a way to increase modelling efficiency.

I watched a couple of Youtube videos and they look pretty good.

Then I tried using the workflow in one of my assemblies.

All went well, except in one case, where the 8 screws were placed back to front. Picture a plate screwed to a boss, the boss having tapped holes in it. Incidentally, the boss is an imported part, so its tapped holes are not recognised by SW as a pattern of holes.

The Smart Fastener screws were automatically placed with their heads embedded in the boss and their threaded ends protruding out of the plate.

I thought, 'That's OK, I'll just change the reference face of the Smart Fasteners and they will all flip'.

Not so, it seems I would need to select the concentric mate on the first Smart Fastener, suppress it, select the coincident mate on the same fastener, change its references and flip its direction, unsuppress the concentric mate and flip its direction.

Then I would have to repeat the above sequence for the remaining 7 Smart fasteners.

It would have been a whole lot faster to drag the fastener from the Toolbox and pattern it, in what I regard as the 'Old-School' manner.

So, I am left with a couple of questions:

• Is there a neat way of changing the mates of a group of Smart Fasteners without having to change each one separately?

• Is there a way to encourage Smart Fasteners to be fitted the right way round during the creation process?

• Should I just stick with the 'Old-School' method?

I am interested to hear from anyone who uses Smart Fasteners in normal operation.

I tried using Hole Series and Smart fasteners, by the way, to create the holes in the assembly components and populate them with fasteners, all automatically, based on sketch geometry, but discounted this technique, because I believe it results in the fastener holes being created as assembly features, so they don't show up on part drawings.

Unless you know differently...

SW2017, sp5

Windows 10 Pro

Cheers,

John