OK so my company has been in a transition state between SW and AutoCad for years. We currently have most of our office using AutoCad, and a few of us using SW (or trying to).
We do structural steel.
Most of our drawings have multiple weldments on one sheet (similar weldments grouped on a sheet, or related ones grouped)
for example we might have a removable staircase, its landing, and the handrails for it on one drawing. The cut list would be laid out like this:
1 Stair 200#
a TS 2x2x1/4 5ft 6 1/4" 25#
b ...
c ...
d ...
e ...
f ...
1 Landing 150#
g ...
h ...
k ...
m ...
etc.
I would like to be able to keep a similar format so that our shop doesn't get two completely different drawing formats all the time. Anyway I was using the weldment feature in SW, and producing a cut list, but it will only let me produce a single cut list on one sheet. This means we have to have a separate drawing for every weldment, and that's just not going to work.
Is there a way to do this?
BTW We have SW 2007
We do structural steel.
Most of our drawings have multiple weldments on one sheet (similar weldments grouped on a sheet, or related ones grouped)
for example we might have a removable staircase, its landing, and the handrails for it on one drawing. The cut list would be laid out like this:
1 Stair 200#
a TS 2x2x1/4 5ft 6 1/4" 25#
b ...
c ...
d ...
e ...
f ...
1 Landing 150#
g ...
h ...
k ...
m ...
etc.
I would like to be able to keep a similar format so that our shop doesn't get two completely different drawing formats all the time. Anyway I was using the weldment feature in SW, and producing a cut list, but it will only let me produce a single cut list on one sheet. This means we have to have a separate drawing for every weldment, and that's just not going to work.
Is there a way to do this?
BTW We have SW 2007
I'm still kind of a green horn to SW. thanks for the information though, just trying to help with what i know so far.
I just thought that I was missing something. Weldments seem to be a bit confusing and I am still trying to figure out the best practices myself.
Lorne
I'm not really sure why you model your weldments this way. If you select each line as its own member, true each member will show in the feature tree as a individual member but that will not affect the cutlist. This just seems like extra steps for no benefit. Am I missing something?
Micheal
I think for your application you are going to have a hard time doing it with SW 2007. You want to do the entire weldment and then organize them into groups to show what goes where right? SW weldments don't handle this well as it wants to group cutlist material for the guy on the saw (4 pieces of .... at ... long rather than 1 piece.... 4 times scattered through the cutlist) The only way I can see grouping them is to create weldments of you groups then combining them all in an assembly. this will mean that you have a number of separated cutlists. I know that in SW2009 they have spent some time on BOM's and so then you would be able to call up the cutlist info in the drawing of the assembly and it would look and work like you want but I don't have any suggestions for you right now. Hopefully someone else know how to group items into catagories.
Lorne