I spend entirely too much time placing fasteners. On top of that it's just incredibly, mind numbingly boring.
We are using toolbox and autoplacing fasteners which works fairly well if all you have is a fastener in a hole. When I have a set up like, fastener, washer, washer, nut I tend to do one hole and then copy with mates.
So what are your super secret time saving tips for placing fasteners.
Yes I use pattern driven when I can.
Tolerance for tedium is an important virtue in design.
I find that if I'm getting bored it usually means I'm doing a repetitive task that more than likely can relatively easily be improved or replaced entirely. To me my boredom is an indicator to look for a better way.
Yes certainly there is some tedium in design...but isn't that why we have checkers :-)
Use a sub assembly made up of your fastener, washer, washer, nut. Cuts done on the number of mates in your assembly. Use to be a 300 mate limit before an assembly would bog done when adding mates (not sure if that is the case any more). We no longer put fasteners in our assemblies unless it is not used as a fastener (ex. adjustment screw).
Use a sub assembly made up of your fastener, washer, washer, nut.
Ok, that's a great idea. That being said can someone tell me how I would have a sub assembly for say an entire machine made of many sub assemblies that contained all the fasteners. That would be ideal. What is the suggested method for mating parts of one assembly to parts in another? Do you just set the fastener assembly to flexible and have all those mates in the "Fastener" S/A?
The more I think about this the better I like it. We could have all our fasteners in a single assembly with a single BOM for an entire machine.
You said you're using the pattern driven component pattern whenever you can, but didn't elaborate. Do you use it for Hole Wizard and Patterned holes? Did you know that when using the feature you can select the face of a hole to drive it instead of needing to find it in the tree (I ask because I used it for years without knowing that)?
Do you use it for Hole Wizard and Patterned holes?
Yes, any time I have a pattern of holes I use the pattern driven component. I have run into issues in the past with it being quirky on which hole you pick as the "Seed" hole and have it place the fasteners someplace where the actual holes are not. But for the most part it works.
My problem currently is that I have an assembly with a ton of hole but few of them are actual "Patterns".
Did you know that when using the feature you can select the face of a hole to drive it instead of needing to find it in the tree
Yes, picking graphically tends to be my default. I actually have difficult with commands that you HAVE to pick items from the tree.
I tend to use the Alt+Drag method for applying mates on hardware type components. Really fast and it could get tedious so I also use copy with mates. If I know ahead of time and have a lot, I'll also do a sub-assy and then break those up at the top level.
Steve C
So if I make my fasteners a sub assembly is there a way to make pattern driven component patterns from parts this S/A is in?
For instance I have assembly 1234. In that assembly I have several parts with patterned holes. I then have a S/A 1234-1, which has all my fasteners. I want to do a pattern based on a part in 1234. Is that possible in some way?
I'll preface by noting that I don't use toolbox...So, what follows may be not be useful to you.
I create two parts. One is the bolt with the washer. The other is the nut with the washer. I name the bolt how I want it, for example, A325-dti-flat-hhnut (i configure all the sizes and lengths). Then the bolt part has all the fastener info in a dimension driven custom property. So, I only have to add 2 parts for each fastener...And, the nut part is actually optional, if I add it, I exclude it from the bom.
From my end, I know it's boring and I know it can be tedious, but I want my BOM's to read what's in the assembly. In other words, if you use the "Assembly Method" then you need to add another drawing to define that "Bolt Nut Washer Sub-Assembly" - Plus if your material thickness changes the you need to add another "Bolt Nut Washer Sub-Assembly" - so now if your main assembly changes and the design change calls for changes in the metal thickness, now you have another set of "Bolt Nut Washer Sub-Assembly"
In the long run, I choose the individual placement of the fasteners using patterns as much as possible. If you need to add a lot of mates into the assembly by mating the fasteners, look for ways to reduce the amount of mates, from 3 to 2..
I completely agree with your method and that's what we do now. What I'm looking for is two fold. A better/faster method for placing fasteners and potentially a method that will increase performance in the assembly. At the moment I have a config that is "No fasteners". When you're working on the assembly I get considerably better performance when all the fasteners are gone.
My thoughts when I posted this was that there might be some "Super secret" macro or add-in that would recognize all the holes made by the hole wizard in an assembly and place fasteners in them based on some criteria.
I did read one post where someone said "It can be done, we are doing it...but I can't share the code with you".
My guess is that a macro whiz could come up with something....macro whiz I am not.
Matt Juric wrote:
I did read one post where someone said "It can be done, we are doing it...but I can't share the code with you".
My guess is that a macro whiz could come up with something....macro whiz I am not.
That's too bad, would be nice to have that code Artem Taturevych is able to point you in the right direction
"Macro Whiz I am Not" ditto ditto ditto
Tolerance for tedium is an important virtue in design.
Adding fasteners is tedious, boring, repetitive, tedious and repetitive. But it's also a chance to review the design and make sure parts line up like they ought.
If your inner child starts saying he's bored, put him in time-out because you got adult things to do.