Hi all,

I'm on a mission to improve our large assembly drawing speeds. We have a few 'top level' assemblies which have drawings for parts manuals and assembly. The assemblies can range from 1500-2500 total parts/sub assemblies. Our assemblies are clean, no mate errors, no extra geometry, in context mates, circular references etc and I'm pretty happy with the opening times of these. On my uncertified garbage can, our largest assembly will open in a little over a minute. (1:10 to be exact) The bulk of this looks like simply opening files (resolved/lightweight).

However the drawing for the same assembly takes nearly 4x as long (4:25). The top level drawings are "simple" albeit have a large number of drawing views. They are comprised of about 5-8 sheets containing a revision table, between 4 and 7 exploded views, 4-7 BoMs and about 10 Isometric views total. I know multi-sheet drawings aren't ideal in SolidWorks but the time it takes to produce and manipulate them individually vs multi-sheet is pretty similar, we just end up with less files to deal with in EPDM.

Aside from balloons and revision flags, there are no other annotations required. It sounds simple in theory but obviously due to the number of views its pretty slow. The problem is we are hemorrhaged by exploded views, we can't speedpak them, we can't use display states, so what are our other options?

Speaking of speedpak, I tried to use speedpak views on the non-exploded views and doing so took approx 2 minutes off the drawing load time, fantastic! However there was no combination of options that could print to paper or pdf an acceptable looking drawing view, they ranged from good colour but pixellated to barely visible on the page, has anyone had success with speedpak drawing views?