Springs and Grind Spacers, Inventor BOM's and Vault Release process

[Anonymous]

Has anyone created a good method to deal with variable length items such as springs and grind spacers in a Vaulted environment?  I would like to avoid creating / continuing methods that create a new ipt file for every spring at the length is it crushed to in the target assembly.  Over time, a common spring may be used multiple times at different crush heights and creating multiple ipt files to represent the same spring model.  Grind spaces are ordered as standard 5.0mm thicknesses but are designed and modeled at 4.5mm, 3.8mm 4.8mm etc….

Multiple files with the same part number / stock number creates unique workflows when the files / BOM data is managed and released through Vault.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Complaints?  All comments are welcome.  Thanks in advance!

[mrattray]

I don't use Vault, however, if I had this problem I would make the springs / spacers as iParts. This way I can have the same file for every compressed length or ground size.

Using different part files for the same part number is a bad idea and should be avoided as much as is possible.