As the post title indicates, I'm looking for suggestions on how to set up o-rings for my company. Here are our requirements:
we use a LOT of orings, mostly the common sizes in the parker book, series 000 through 400. We may have some larger but the bulk is there. We have many different materials, but I would say most sizes will have 4 main materials. There may be 20 or so other materials that more common sizes may need. Also, the other requirement which is the one that stumps me a little, is that each on of these needs to be deformable, so that we can show it in an assembly (with squeeze or stretch).
So reading through the posts here on o-rings, I see that most say to create a derived config for the oring's installed state. Thats what we were thinking as well, but I sort of have a problem with that. We use so many o-rings that we would be constantly adding derived configs. Also I'm not sure I want all users to be touching the template files constantly.
Using NX what we did was make the template a deformable part, so upon adding to assembly, a small window would pop up for cross section and ID. Is there any way we can do that so that the template stays as just the template sizes? Should I be looking at smart components?
Also, we plan to model the orings as elipses, with mating planes on either side.
Thanks,
Brad
Brad,
I am attaching the o-ring file we use. O-rings were always a bone of contention where I used to work.
I personally perfered round o-rings. This allowed 1 single o-ring to be shown in a BOM with the qty
adjusting as aposed to the way they wanted and that was showing squashed o-rings which led to
multiple o-ring listings in the BOM that represented the same part.
We had about 4 main rings representing different materials, but it was easy to swap out if need be.