Assemblies can be made for several reasons. You don’t always need to allow motion, in fact there are times your assemblies (in-context and skeleton modeling for example) need to avoid it. Your assembly might be doing the actual engineering to make sure parts can work together, or maybe you’re just documenting the assembly so it can be assembled. It’s ok to have different assembly files for different purposes. Efficiency is one frequent goal.
This is a chapter from Mastering Solidworks, 34 pages of pdf glory.
This chapter introduces you to techniques you can use to manage performance issues as well as
general-use issues, efficiency, browse-worthiness, and searchability in assemblies.
◆ Set apart the elements of an assembly
◆ Increase performance by using SpeedPaks
◆ Organize assemblies by using subassemblies
◆ Group parts and mates by using folders
◆ Show names and descriptions with Tree Display options
◆ Employ helpful assembly tools
I’ve learnt this the hard way with my biggest assembly yet (around 600 parts, in context). I thought it would make sense to do a single assembly since every parts are welded together. To fix my horrible performances, i tried to create new sub-assemblies. Sadly parts that had refereces in other subassemblies now loose the referece.
In each sub assemblies there are only 4 parts that are no longer referenced, but those 4 parts are used by hundreds of parts present in the subassemblies.
Is there an efficient way to redo all the references?