I recently started with a Mold Design Company in central Ohio. I have over 2 years of Solidworks experience. After doing some research they purchased SW on my recommendation. I am new to mold design and they are new to SW.
We are struggling to nail down good practices for file management. In my old job I was a machine designer and I used file association constantly. We wanted our files to be linked. In this shop we design a mold, perfect it, and never look at it again, which means that for reusing part data association is a real drag, but we may want to use that mold base again. Also configurations are to clumsy.
What we have done, is create an assembly file for one of our most common mold bases and we have used "pack-and-go" to basically save it in our library and when we need it we open it run "pack-and-go on it", move it to our new job file and rename it. This seems to work well, as long as we have no assembly features that reference the old assembly.
What I am wondering is if there are any other mold shops out there using SW and what they do? How do you use SW to make new molds with existing mold base data?
We would love to hear how others are doing this. Please contact me.
David Smith
Injection Mold Design
Thomas Tool and Mold
Westerville OH