Paint Area

[Jacques_Blaauw]

Hi there,

How do you guys calculate paint area?

We do a lot of chutes (for mining).  They need to be painted on the outside only.  They also need to be lined with rubber sheet on the inside.  The area given in the physical tab in iProperties is the total area.

The area of the edges of the plates are small enough that we can ignore them, but is there a way to calculate half the model's area and get that result in the drawing in a text note?

We've only recently switched over to Inventor (used to be on Solidworks, where we had the same problem), so I'm open to any suggestions.

How do you guys go about getting prices for paint?

Thank you,

Jacques Blaauw

[sam_m]

you can link to the part's physical properties through the text box (see image) - select drop-down 1, then select property with drop-down 2 and insert the value with button 3.

but... that's the total area of the part...  If you want half of this then will probably have to use some VBA programming to obtain and half this and sorry can't help.   Thought I'd mention this in case displaying the total volume on the idw was any help at all... 

Just had a quick ponder whether you can create a user parameter within the ipt file and import the physical property into an equation and half it there (and then can grab thus user parameter in the idw), but couldn't see an obvious way to use the part's physical properties within an equation (if someone knows a way that could probably work).  

[jtylerbc]

I didn't see an Inventor version listed, but I think you could probably do something like this through iLogic if you're on Inventor 2011 or higher. 

Create a custom iProperty called "PaintArea", then make an iLogic rule with this code:

surfaceArea = iProperties.Area
PaintArea = surfaceArea/2
iProperties.Value("Custom", "PaintArea") = PaintArea

 You could then set the Event Trigger for the rule to "Any Part Geometry Change."

I'm new to iLogic, so I only tested this on a part.  If you're doing this for an assembly, it might require some adjustments.  It sounded similar to something I came up with yesterday for estimating steel cost based on weight, so I thought I would take a stab at it. 

[ali_akay]

in my assambly pipes and sheet metals, for this i wrote a code, it can be also for you. 

if you have any stuffed materials other than sheet metals you must add in the second line

surfaceArea = iProperties.Area
If iProperties.Value("Project","Document SubType Name") = "Sheet Metal"
PaintArea = surfaceArea
Else
PaintArea = surfaceArea/2
End If
iProperties.Value("Custom", "PaintArea") = PaintArea

have a nice day.