I am a seasoned SolidWorks designer and Admin but I am new to setting up routing, I am trying to set this up as I transition my company from AutoCAD to SolidWorks. We use a mix of flanged and grooved components. Flanges do not seem to be a problem with routing. I am trying to figure out how to deal with grooved pipe ends, groove couplings, and grooved components in routing.
Part of our push to SolidWorks is the ability to detail sections of pipe that will require a machining operation such as grooving, coping, and threading. This along with a detailed cutlist is what we are hoping to accomplish to give to our manufacturing department.
Can anyone help? Point me at a thread, point me at a video, even post an explanation below.
Thank you so much and Merry Christmas,
Andy
Sorry man but you're SOL. Grooves and threads are completely absent from routing. The only way of going about those is by right clicking on the pipe, set "create custom configuration" and editing the part directly to add in the threads or grooves.
I've been using routing for about 2 years now and while it has its strong points, it lacks severely in others and the stability is abysmal to the point where the wrong click will *literally* break the model.
Now I personally have moved past routing for any job requiring more than just a couple spool pieces and started using weldments with a combination of the routing library using "insert part" and custom library features. It's a little more time consuming to bring in the parts by hand and you have to know your elbow radius and stuff like that... but the drawing details I can produce are 100x better. I have a library feature part for grooves that I just drag onto the end of a pipe and it cuts the correct size groove to the pipe size configuration I select.
My only major complaint is that the weldments cut list doesn't pull and item information whatsoever so i have to name the parts. Otherwise the stability is 100%. Not a single crash since.