Hello
I'm designing the following assembly (see attached).
The product has 5 models, but those models have 2 possible lengths (Type A/B), it also can be right/left (L/R) and according to the wind direction (AB/ZU).
Then, we have 5*2*2*2=40 configurations for this product. As you can see at the image, it's a simple assembly with a housing, a top cover, a front cover and a back cover.
Previously I was designing on Solid Edge and the metod I was used to work was top-to-down designing driven by a .xls worksheet. It was a quick and simple way to work, but now we have moved to SolidWorks and EPDM. Our reseller suggested me to allways work with configurations but I think It's a tedious way for designing this type of assemblies.
How would you design this?
If I design it by a top-to-down design, I found two ways for doing it, but when I chage between models, all drawing becomes outdated and SolidWorks doesn't work fine with outdated drawings as Solid Edge does. The other problem is that there is no difference between parts for EPDM.
This example only has 40 configurations, but we have some other complex product that has tens of thousands of configurations.
I appreciate some help.
Thank you in advance.
Regards.
Raúl
I'm not a big fan of top-down modeling--probably because the stuff I work on rarely lends itself to it. But whether you do top down or bottom up, you'd do this with design tables if you have 40 configurations. It's very straightforward and fast. You can also insert the design tables in your drawings.
For 10,000 configurations, you are probably looking at something more like DriveWorks, where users create configurations based on a few parameters when they need them. I'm not sure SolidWorks will be able to handle 10,000 configurations (or more accurately, I'm pretty sure it won't).