I am trying the Costing tool with one of our parts, which is a round part with some holes drilled and tapped in the side.
Here's a picture of the part.
This picture shows the Feature Manager, complete with Hole Wizard tapped holes.
This picture shows the Cost Manager, with only turned features recognized.
What can I do to add a drilling operation to drill and tap the holes?
Charlie
Great question. I recreated your part (or close to it) and used 3DSketch and 2D planar Hole Wizard features. Costing didn't find the 3DSketch features, but it did find the 2D planar holes. Hole 5 was created on the plane that you see below.
Create planes to hold your Hole Wizard features, then add them as 2D sketch holes. Worked for me. I've posted my part if you need to see it.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for taking a look. I opened your part, and the first thing I noticed was the costing was done with a non-standard template. I quickly made things go south by changing the material, but I have a feeling that's not relevant to what's going on here. I tried your suggestion of creating a plane and using a 2-D sketch for the holes, and I am still unable to get costing to recognize tapered pipe tap holes. I have a similar part with two holes in one end, and I can't get Costing to find those holes no matter how I define the sketch plane or the sketch.
I have the impression feature recognition has a way to go before Costing is a useful tool for mill/turn parts.
As a follow-up I've run another exercize on a rectangular block shaped part. The costing tool found all of the features, but I see where some large holes had a couple of different operations assigned to them, both drilling (listed in the "No Cost Assigned" folder) and milling operations (which were in the "Mill Operations" folder). Normal drilled holes and normal straight thread tapped holes were recognized and had operations assigned to them, but tapered pipe tap holes are not seen as such. The tapered portion of the hole will have a volume milling operation assigned, but there will not be a drill or tap applied to the hole. Something that concerns me is the Feature Manager lists the tapped holes as 8-32, but the Costing Manager shows an M4 tap being applied. When I look at the tap diameters listed in the (englishstandard) template they do not correspond with inch taps.
One thing I don't understand is how the cost can go down 27% if I add a countersink operation to two tapped holes. I just removed the c-sink from the two tapped holes, clicked to update the cost and it increased from $41.20 to $56.19. I then re-added two c-sinks, clicked to update and the price went back down to $41.20. Something isn't quite right, yet.
I'm using the standard template, if that makes any difference.
Hi Charles,
I will have one of the developers take a look at your initial question and get back to you on this issue, thanks for pointing this out. You also mention that you are using the standard template but the Costing Manager shows an M4 being applied? If you do not have metric taps available in the english standard template this should not happen, could you send a screen shot?
Also, I know tapered holes are not something we specifically address as of now, but with custom operations you can simulate the addition of a tapping operation by applying a price to the face, but this is a work around for now. We are trying to address this more specifically in the future. To add a custom operation you must select the custom operation button in the top left of the costing manager:
Once you are there, you can choose from a list of custom operations available in the template or select "Add New" from the dropdown. If you select "Add New", you can enter a new operation to add, apply a setup cost, and select if you want to apply it per edge length, face area, etc. In this case you would probably be best to select per face area and then select which faces you want to apply the cost to and assign a cost per area. Please let me know if this makes sense, I will try to post my tutorial from SWW a bit later today to offer more assistance.
Thanks,
-Blake
Hi Blake,
Here's a screen shot from the default english standard template.
The tap diameters listed here look a lot like metric sizes converted to inches. The thing that really made me think these were carried over from a metric template is the fact some common sizes like 1/4" (.250"), 3/8" (.375") and 1/2" (.500") are not included. That's when I studied the numbers a little closer and saw they don't match up with any non-metric screw sizes.
Charlie
Here's another picture showing an M6 tap being applied to a 1/4-20 hole.
Charlie
You are correct, in some cases we do not have traditional standard sizes as the templates were primarily designed as a starting point. The idea with the templates is you can sculpt them however you deem necessary to better represent your own machining processes and tools. I do agree that the metric sizes should not be appearing if you are using an english templat though so I will have this investigated, thanks for pointing this out!
-Blake
Hi Charlie,
I created something similar to the part you used and it seems to find the tapping operations fine. What version of SW are you using? This might've been an improvement for 2013 or a later SP for 2012...
-Blake
Hi Blake,
I'm running SW Professional 2013 x64, SP2. I can replace the tapered pipe tap holes with straight tapped holes and they will be recognized.
Charlie
Ah, you are right, I failed to create a tapered hole when I was mocking this up, I believe this is unfortunately a short-coming of our feature recognition at the moment, I'm glad you made us aware of this though Charlie. I'll be sure to get this worked on as soon as we can As I mentioned before though, you can still finagle a solution using custom operations, but I hope to not make this necessary for the future.
Thanks
-Blake
Hi ,
Whether the step or iges files can be used in solidworks costing?
Regards
Hemanth
Hi Charles,
I will have one of the developers take a look at your initial question and get back to you on this issue, thanks for pointing this out. You also mention that you are using the standard template but the Costing Manager shows an M4 being applied? If you do not have metric taps available in the english standard template this should not happen, could you send a screen shot?
Also, I know tapered holes are not something we specifically address as of now, but with custom operations you can simulate the addition of a tapping operation by applying a price to the face, but this is a work around for now. We are trying to address this more specifically in the future. To add a custom operation you must select the custom operation button in the top left of the costing manager:
Once you are there, you can choose from a list of custom operations available in the template or select "Add New" from the dropdown. If you select "Add New", you can enter a new operation to add, apply a setup cost, and select if you want to apply it per edge length, face area, etc. In this case you would probably be best to select per face area and then select which faces you want to apply the cost to and assign a cost per area. Please let me know if this makes sense, I will try to post my tutorial from SWW a bit later today to offer more assistance.
Thanks,
-Blake