I am trying to send a customer an assembly. While we have an NDA with this customer, we know they also deal with some of our competitors. They need a model of our assembly. Usually I would simply save as a part and send it, but my bosses are not satisfied with this solution in this case. An assembly saved as a part still shows the feature tree and components can be suppressed to show the individual parts. To somebody that wants to gather design features for nefarious uses, this is no hindrance. Many downloadable components from vendors simply say "imported" in the feature tree. So, is there any way to do this?
our general proceedure is this; insert a blank part into the assy aligned with the default datums. edit the part in the assy and use the "join" feature selecting all of the components (box select). exit edit part mode. open part in its own window and inspect geometry - depending on what you had to start with and how much you need to hide you may need to add some extrudes or something to cover up details. then save as a different file type (our default is STEP). this will remove any link back to part names etc.
Jeremy