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Weldments, How do you do them?

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Message 1 of 9
CelticDesignServices
4731 Views, 8 Replies

Weldments, How do you do them?

OK, it's been a while since I've been active here...continued schooling took priority.

Anyways, I thought I'd post the question of how you do your weldments in Inventor.

I've always seen n umerous ways and thought I'd get a few ideas and comments from those of you that create them.

 

The most obvious choice would be to use the Weldment features of Inventor, but I actually see very few people do such.

 

I see people who will model and dimension each weld prep feature and then draw a stetch and fill it in with hatching to respresent the welds on the drawing. To me, that's crazy, but it seems to be the norm.

 

So, I ask....how do you create your weldments and why?

 

It's good to be back.

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Jim
Celtic Design Services, LLC

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Message 2 of 9

We create our weldments as assemblies of parts, apply any treatments, apply the welds, then apply any post-weld machining.

Works fine for our shop folks, and we get very few complaints from our clients about items not fitting..

Mike Patchus - Lancaster SC

Inventor 2025 Beta


Alienware m17, Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10980HK CPU @ 2.40GHz 3.10 GHz, Win 11, 64gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super

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Message 3 of 9

We just put the peices together and call it a day. The weld info gets put on the IDW, though I would prefer we used cosmetic welds and put that info in the model. The only time we actually "weld" stuff is if we are doing analysis of some sort on it.


Lance W.
Inventor Pro 2013 (PDS Ultimate)
Vault Pro 2013
Windows 7 64
Xeon 2.4 Ghz 12GB
Message 4 of 9

I just use the Weldment tools in Inventor.  Sure, the welds look a little odd, but I have to do FEA on virtually everything I make out of steel, so for me it just makes sense to use the tools provided.

 

I can't even imagine trying to model all the stitch welds that I use by hand.  That would be a completely insane amount of work.  I know that some people do that, just so they can get the cosmetics the way that they want them, but that's a level of give-a-**** that I just can't seem to muster up.

 

Now, if I'm going to be doing something in Showcase where the welds will be incredibly obvious I might throw a fillet or two on them just to break the sharp edges down, but that's the extent of extra trouble I'm willing to take.

Rusty

EESignature

Message 5 of 9

Our shop here is at the extreme end of the lazy spectrum. We just show all of the parts assembled and let the welders figure it out for themselves. We don't tell them where to weld, how to weld, what prep to do, we just let them wing it. I know that sounds nuts, but that's "how we've done it for thirty years..."  It does save a lot of work on our end. In a way, it actually makes sense. I don't know jack about welding, the welders do. So, why would I tell them how to do their job?

Mike (not Matt) Rattray

Message 6 of 9

For welments, we will draw the parts and add the weld prep to each indiviual part.  Reason for that is because usually these parts are large and the weld prep needs to be done before the parts go to the fitting table.  We can show a view of the prep on each part so the fitter knows exactly what to do.

 

After the parts are drawn and put into a weldment, we use the machining feature to add the machining.

 

 

Message 7 of 9

I constrain all the pieces (individual IPT files) together in a weldment assembly but do not usually put in actual welds or the prep.  I have found that the modelling of the welds doesn't always work out.  This seems to be especially true when welds are wrapping around corners and or several welds meet.  It seems that more often than not the fillet doesn't model correctly and I end up with an unintentional gap so I just leave all the welds off.  I stil call out the welds on the drawing.  I'm not overly happy with this way because then the weight of the weld isn't accounted for in the weight of the part and you can't model the prep work or your weights will be even further off.  On large fabrications the weld weight can be significant.  I'd prefer to model the welds but I can't really justify the amount of time I spend fighing the model when I do.

 

One problem I have with weldments is the weight calculation when there are machining operations done to the weldment.  There doesn't appear to be any way to get the "non-machined" weight of the part other than to disable all of the machining operations, update the mass and then note what that weight is.  As a result I usually don't do any machining operations on the individual weldments.  As an example our housings consist of an Upper Housing and a Lower Housing.  I'll do weldment IAMs of the two halves and have no machining operations.  I then insert those halves into the Housing Machining IAM where I do any and all machining operations.  This way I have good weight for the fabrication stage of the halves (except for weld weight).  To me this way makes sense because that is basiclly how it happens in real life.  This method doesn't work so well on a "one piece" welded fabrication because you would end up with two IAM files for the one part, one fabrication only and one machined.  This isn't really a deal breaker but I'd rather not have two seperate files for the one part.  For the one piece fabrication I like to have a drawing showing the part as fabricated and one drawing showing the part as machined which is easily done using the Model State setting and multiple sheets in the drawing file.  However, as I mentioned earlier there doesn't appear to be a straight forward way to capture the weight of the fabrication only stage of the part.

Stuart Kinzel
Inventor 2013-64bit, HP EliteBook8740w Intel Core i5CPU 2.67 GHz
8GB memory
Windows 7 64bit
Message 8 of 9
LT.Rusty
in reply to: SKinzel


@SKinzel wrote:

I constrain all the pieces (individual IPT files) together in a weldment assembly but do not usually put in actual welds or the prep.  I have found that the modelling of the welds doesn't always work out.  This seems to be especially true when welds are wrapping around corners and or several welds meet.  It seems that more often than not the fillet doesn't model correctly and I end up with an unintentional gap so I just leave all the welds off.  I stil call out the welds on the drawing.  I'm not overly happy with this way because then the weight of the weld isn't accounted for in the weight of the part and you can't model the prep work or your weights will be even further off.  On large fabrications the weld weight can be significant.  I'd prefer to model the welds but I can't really justify the amount of time I spend fighing the model when I do.

 

One problem I have with weldments is the weight calculation when there are machining operations done to the weldment.  There doesn't appear to be any way to get the "non-machined" weight of the part other than to disable all of the machining operations, update the mass and then note what that weight is.  As a result I usually don't do any machining operations on the individual weldments.  As an example our housings consist of an Upper Housing and a Lower Housing.  I'll do weldment IAMs of the two halves and have no machining operations.  I then insert those halves into the Housing Machining IAM where I do any and all machining operations.  This way I have good weight for the fabrication stage of the halves (except for weld weight).  To me this way makes sense because that is basiclly how it happens in real life.  This method doesn't work so well on a "one piece" welded fabrication because you would end up with two IAM files for the one part, one fabrication only and one machined.  This isn't really a deal breaker but I'd rather not have two seperate files for the one part.  For the one piece fabrication I like to have a drawing showing the part as fabricated and one drawing showing the part as machined which is easily done using the Model State setting and multiple sheets in the drawing file.  However, as I mentioned earlier there doesn't appear to be a straight forward way to capture the weight of the fabrication only stage of the part.



 
I can't necessarily help you out with your weld issues, but the machining operations may be a different story.  At AU this year there was a class on top-down design approaches, and the instructor had a really novel use for iParts and iAssemblies.  He used iParts and iAssemblies to show the various manufacturing stages of each part.  For instance, factory member 1 showed a raw blank casting.  Member 2 showed the casting with the first machining operation complete.  Member 3 showed the next operation, etc., until the final member was the completed part.  It was a very interesting approach, and something like that might come in useful for alleviating your multiple-file issues with your machining operations?  Yeah, it still creates multiple files, but they're accessed fairly painlessly and transparently from within the same IDW or IAM ...

Rusty

EESignature

Message 9 of 9
karthur1
in reply to: LT.Rusty


@LT.Rusty wrote:
.....
I can't necessarily help you out with your weld issues, but the machining operations may be a different story.  At AU this year there was a class on top-down design approaches, and the instructor had a really novel use for iParts and iAssemblies.  He used iParts and iAssemblies to show the various manufacturing stages of each part. 

This seems like it would take a lot of time to setup.

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