Hi, I may need you help with a specific problem wich may very basic for some but for me It feels unsolveable.
But first a little disclaimer: I am from germany and I try my best to write in english. But maybe there will be a lot of mistakes. Please be easy with that .
I am working for a company wich produces Flight Cases (these plywood boxes with aluminum profiles).
I am basically alone with CAD-Design âkowledeâ and just migrated to Solidworks.
And here comes my problem:
I want to create Case where all individual parts of the assembly can be configured in its dimensions (width, height, depth, hight body, height lid and wall thickness).
My preferred method of modeling is Top Down. So I first create my assembly file and then my first part, wich will be the âbase bodyâ for my whole assembly. This body will be a multibody-part with three âboxesâ ontop each other.
The lowest will represent the inner dimensions of the body part of the Case.
The section in the middle will represent the gap between the body and the lid wich will result when we attach the âlocating profileâ(an aluminum profile wich âconnecttsâ the lid and the body).
And finally the top part wich represents the inner dimensions of the lid.
The background of why I create the inner dimensions should be clear: i just want to make sure that everyting I want to put into the box will fit in the end .
Now, that I have my base part, I should be able to create all individual walls along my base model.
But here is, where It is getting messy for me:
I have tried different methods so far.
At first, I have tried to set global variables on the assembly level. Wich did not work out very convenient. I had to export the global variables and assign each part of the assembly to this exported file. But maybe I did something wrong here? I dont know.
The next Idea was to check out Driveworks Express. Wich looks promising but very hard to understand at least for me Here is the Idea to take the dimensions of my base model and set them as variable values inside Driveworks. But how do I deal with the wall thickness of the sheets? These cannot orient on the base model as far as I know.
So far my learning resource is mostly youtube but I have not found a tutorial yet wich deals with this specific problem. Either they explain parametric design only on âPart-levelâ or they have existing assemblys and dont explain how the different parts are interconnected to each other.
Please, I need any help I can get to make this work. It is kind of hard to have literally no one to ask (face to face)
Iâm not sure Iâm following completely. Are you creating a multibody part to control the size and length of other parts in the assembly? Can you share at least several screenshots to help us?
If you are using the workflow I think you are, you may benefit from a simplified SSP process. This basically creates a single master part that consists of planes, sketches, equations, and axes.This part drives everything in your entire project. Next, this part is inserted into an empty part file using Insert>Part. This part is defined by the master SSP part (repeat this step for each part file), and an assembly is created by locking part origins together. Thatâs just a quick overview.
As the others have mentioned, the Skeleton Sketch Part may work well for you. Another method that you might want to try is the one I use in similar situations. I create my Parts, but then edit them within the Assembly, referencing a sketch or other Part in the Assembly.
I believe that by using Driveworks or global variables you might be making this more difficult than it needs to be.
welcome JaLi you mentioned you just migrated to Solidworks. May I ask what CAD you were using before? The cool thing about this forum is itâs not just SW, many here have used other systems and might be able to translate the modeling process you were used to into what it looks like in Solidworks.
Did he just create a top down reference in the assy to the Skeleton part with that derived sketch? That seems counter to the SSP methodology where the SSP is inserted and referenced at the part level rather than assy. I avoid Top Down in-context references like the plague, just to easy to break.
Hi Jason,.. sorry if that is the case (bad).. I honestly/only partially watched the video,.. so, maybe not a good video to show. I think Go is/was pitching the (was theirs?) Treehouse here? <()>
Yeah, he created a derived sketch from one part to another in the context of the assembly. I was like, why would you do this? But youâre right, he was more trying to illustrate the Treehouse function, which doesnât really allow you to build part to part relationships. So they shoehorned it in this way. Bad idea.
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