One of the most common yet time consuming tasks engineers in metal working have is generating profile parts drawings for vendors. The details required by the vendor are always the same.... Material type, material thickness, profile view with longest two x and y dimensions, file/part name and quantity, drawing scale. Every single on of these parameters exist in the SW file. Where is the function in SW that does this automatically at the top level?
Have you looked into Driveworks? I think DriveworksXpress (free version that comes with SW) can spit out the drawings, but the scale won't be correct. I believe the full Driveworks that you pay for separately may be able to produce the drawings with the views correctly scaled.
No, I appreciate your direction Matt, I will look that up!
Driveworks has their own youtube channel. Here's a tutorial from that channel:
DriveWorksXpress Bookcase Tutorial - YouTube
It may be the best 20 minutes you've spent on something in a while from your description of your workflow.
Here's the channel: driveworksxpress - YouTube
I don't see anything close to what I'm trying to do in any of the sample videos and to top it off it won't work on my files because it doesn't accept a period in the file name. We use periods in all our file names to represent the material thickness.
A pdf and a dxf for each part.
Well, that appears to be close to what I'm trying to achieve. Was this done in DriveWorksExpress?
Fred Work Express.
That's encouraging, I'm trying it now on a small project.
Its not that bad.
Usually I don't dimension everything on cut drawing since vendor will get the DXF.
Part number is a note with file name since I use "one part one drawing" and part number is file name.
I use customer model and make weldment. Sometime need to add material for cut.
To save dxf, I delete everything except the view I need and notes.
I'll keep the dimensions. Incase scale is wrong on the export.
Here I am still spending hours in preparing profile part drawings for vendor quotes and formatting weldment material lists in a way that is presentable to vendors. Is no one else experiencing this? Am I missing something?