Salesmen have been crowing for decades that new product X will be the one to finally kill 2d drawings. It works for some industries. I rarely make 2D drawings, at least not the detailed ones that I used to make 30+ years ago. For plastic parts, I might have a couple critical dimensions, maybe a surface finish and a note about gates and knit lines. Molds are made largely with CNC equipment, but there is a lot of manual setup and multiple processes.
What would it take to get your company, your product, your industry off of 2D drawings? Do these 3D mbd representations have any chance of flying in mfg and fabrication? Looking for opinions.
As a preamble, we have fabrication (laser, press brake, sawing, welding), machining, and assembly departments here. I figure that’s a pretty fair average for most OEMs.
We currently use 2D drawings for:
-Laser nesting (only BOMs and some very generalized notes about orientation of critical parts).
-Bending
-Saw cutlists (this includes barcoded cells in the cutlist to load programs).
-Welding (BOMs, dimensioned views, and exploded views).
-Machining.
-Assembly (BOMs and exploded views)
-Customer installation drawings
Of all of the above, all could theoretically be done with MBD. The difficulty would getting everyone to actually use it. Using a tablet makes sense in machining where you have highly detailed parts and “highly skilled” people. Using a tablet at a welding table does not make sense. How do you deal with spatter and dirt contamination, gloved hands on a touchscreen, and crusty old guys who would be opposed to it on principle?
In short, I think 2D drawing will always be used in some stations; even if we move to MBD in other areas of production. It’s a cost/benefit analysis, and I don’t see it winning everywhere.
As a parallel; haven’t they been saying the same thing about AutoCAD for nigh on thirty years? And it’s STILL so popular that 25% of DSS ads are targeting it by pushing DraftSight.
Edit: Added some formatting
I am assuming the 2D drawing you mean here is a PDF copy of 2D drawing…
Will MBD replace 2D drawing? IMO, no, at least for now.
Will I switch to MBD? Most probably no
True, some company may embrace MBD completely. I had heard some great success story too.
But when you are dealing with lots of vendors/suppliers to fabricate your part, MBD is just a pipe dream…
→I had spoken with some of our supplier about MBD… and the first question that they ask back is… “What is MBD”
Trying to have a “hard copy” of MBD is a problem…
→A lot of people still rely on pen an paper to redline/markup drawing, design review/ FAI, etc
→Printing CAD with MDB is not as easy as printing PDF from my experienec..
Sharing data with MBD is another disaster…
→Native CAD? Someone will complaint about concern about IP even with NDA, and not all supplier using the same CAD system. Heck we even have issue sharing CAD internally sometimes.
→3D PDF? It is really slow (at least for me)
→eDrawing? Try to convince someone to download a viewer for it… ugh…
→eDrawing as *.exe? Some company flag and block exe file and you need to manually convert it to exe
→Html? Same as edrawing exe, require manual conversion
→Step242? Can solidwork export as step242? Wait i need a MBD license? Wait i cant import step242 back to solidwork?
Sometime, it take more time to create a MBD drawing than a 2D drawing..
→3D MBD drawing can get real messy if your model changed (eg: change request) after you create the MBD drawing
→A lot of time minimal dimension 2D drawings (with note saying to refer to CAD) seem to be much easier than trying to figure out a proper MBD
If you are producing your own drawing and fabricating your own part, MBD may have a place… But when you rely on a lot of 3rd party vendor/supplier (molder, sheet metal fabricator, machine shop, etc) to produce your part, a good old fashion 2D drawing with CAD is more suitable
I used to be an advocate years ago for 3D only with some sort of PMI (MBD) but the more I worked with our manufacturing and our field organization, the more I see the need for 2d drawings still. I would add that they need both as seeing the 3d model has it advantages as well. Always seemed like a 2d eDrawings file was a nice compromise as you can view both in the same file (could use some enhancements though).
2D drawings allow you to get a lot of information at a glance. A sheet metal part drawing is a good example. At a glance I can see both the formed and flat views, material, part numbers, etc., all at a glance. With a model only, I need to move the model around, select properties too see material and other info. Just more clicks and fiddling.
Also, the modeling dimensioning in MBD is just poor. Even in drawings I have to create sketch geometry to help place a dimension, not much of an option in the model. I don’t think many, if any people use MBD so SolidWorks doesn’t get much feedback to improve it. Not to mention they made it an additional module to pay for, whereas 2D drawings are included.
What is a 2D drawing? It is a guided tour of a 3D object. It is the conversation you would have with someone who asked you to explain the details of your 3D design.
Good point re. the welding spatter, hadn’t thought of that. It triggered an idea in me that "surely every young welder today owns a smartphone, and surely someone has come up with a protective case for such phones - had a google . . . and the answer seems to be “no”.
This poor chap ruined a tablet and a smartphone with just a couple of specks of molten metal.
How do we ensure the CAD publish as MBD accurately?
I already have enough issue with publishing as PDF (especially with CREO drawing that using its default font, ugh)… thinking about having the software to publish to MBD consistently just… scare me
We would need to change chief of production because he is the only one who wont give up on paper.
Everything here is done with 3D model , and only purpose of the drawing is to check dimensions , which never happens anyway
I wouldn’t say it won’t happen, but I don’t think we’ll ever get away from 2d drawings, for at least two reasons. One is similar to the situation mike miller mentioned. Our installations are outside, with some of the components being built in the welding shop. If we issued tablets to the fabrication/construction crew they probably wouldn’t last two weeks. Plus, I can’t get them to read the drawings now.
The second reason is that we’re an accredited testing lab, and we issue a written report for every project. It needs to have drawings as part of the report package.
Remove all the people in the company still demand 2D drawing.
I’ve been sending out frame cut with overall dimension and told to dimension everything. Even vendor don’t care.
And the same person will put their “note” on the print so we need to scan it back into the system.
My experience with the welders is this:
I moved away from the orthograhic views of weldments (frames for ride-on floor scrubbers and cleaners) which were a bunch of lines packed together to 3D detail views to create my frame weldments drawings. The welding manager bought me lunch! Said it made things so clear they had to do very little communication back to R&D to understand where the welds were going! From that day forward the shop demanded the iso detail views of the drawing for welding.
Technically, we moved away from “2D” to 3D- just that the 3D was printed on paper (2D).
There are business cases where 2D is still preffered and mainly because the 2D formats are easier to understand and “follow”. Think P&ID, wire diagrams, HVAC, etc. All these utilize simplified drawing formats for clarity. If the goal of a drawing is for communication…why make it more complex than it needs to be?
MBD does have it purposes and it is at the core of a digital twin. But we can’t lose sight of communication!
This one is pretty easy. My boss would have to see someone using this investment in technology to make more money than he does. Then and only then would we enhance the existing status quo of who gets what technology in accordance with tradition and outdated expectations.
There is one alternative. Furthermore, we meet the needs or our clients. Our clients require 2D drawings transmitted for review, as far as I understand it. When they increase their needs, we would meet them or lose out.
The problem with MBD is that in order to take advantage of them you have to have equipment that can take advantage of it and vendors that have equipment that can also take advantage of it.
So for us every machine we have would have to be programmed with CAM and with CAM programmers that understand MBD and tolerance. Beyond that all of our operators, inspectors etc etc would have to have access to the models, be able to get the MBD data and or utilize it.
My company is no where near that. We’d have to have CAD stations at every machine or some way to get the tolerance to the operators. Only about 30% of what we run is even currently programmed in CAM. I don’t even think our CMM’s are able to inspect based on MBD so the CMM operators would have to pull the information in the model.
Add the above to Routings, paper trails, mark ups and on and on that still is fairly quick and easy to do on paper and we are a LONG, LONG ways from being able to be paperless.
Furthermore many of our vendors are even further away from that goal. You have translation issues where you might/Probably will loose the MBD data.
In the end I think most companies are LONG way off from this.
Some companies sectors are far closer and in essence have been driven to it early. Things like molds and other more complex surface models have relied heavily on the CAD model for years now while others have been much less reliant and support by MBD.
Intellectual Property Protection probably plays a part too. 2D drawings are useful in that way, because each worker can be given only the information they need to do their job. Of course the same thing could be achieved by making defeatured 3D models specific to each process.
It’s a bit of an outdated idea though when you think about it - what with the arrival of cheap 3D scanning equipment. All a competitor needs to do these days is buy your product, take it to bits, scan all the parts and there they have it.
This is the fastest way to get a Yugo from a Porche
In fact I think you see this sort of thing all the time. How may “Knock offs” have you seen that are as good of product as the original? Not many. the reason for this is that you can reverse engineer a product and get the general shape and function, but you cant reverse engineer the engineering that went into that product. You can measure a shaft, but you have next to no idea what the tolerance is, finish etc etc is.
By the time you get the general shape of the part, draw that part up, properly design it by looking at materials, finishes, tolerances etc etc etc…you have almost as much time into it as the original designer. Actually, in my experience, in some cases you end up having more time than if you would have just designed it from scratch.
To the contrary MBD gives you all that information for free.
Is it really that easy to just scan and copy? Not really. There is plenty that goes into making all but the simplest products beyond the physical shape. Just getting molding processes under control can take Herculean effort.
What about material specs? What about tolerances? Electrical and thermal? Firmware and software?
Worth a mention - there’s probably very few 2D drawings fluttering around in a modern car assembly plant, with most of them being almost totally automated. So maybe, I dunno, get rid of all the humans? Then, once that’s done, throw out all the printers/photocopiers?
