We are having a problem running the bills of materials function in AutoCAD Mechanical 2010. We have simple 2d blocks, that are basically just rectangles, that have a single info point attached to them We insert several blocks into the drawing then place them next to each other in a vertical row. We then insert predefined info points for other parts ontop of them. The example we ran yesterday is 4 rectangles in a vertical row with a total of 7 predefined info points inserted on them. We then made a block of the 4 rectangles and info points. We then arrayed the new block with 1 row and 1374 columns. We then ran the BOM Database function. We need our view set to expanded. We then pressed the expand/collapse button to expand the rows in the bom. Once we pressed the expand button our machine bogged down and it literally took 30mins to expand the rows. Once the rows were finally expanded we could create the parts list. Our parts list consisted of 4 lines as follows: 2273 of part A, 1273 of part B, 2546 of part C, 9416 of Part D. Is there any way to speed up the bom function?
The computer specifications are as follows:
Dell Precision PWS 670
Xeon CPU 3.20 GHz
3.00 GB of Ram
XP Professional 32 bit service pack 3
Nvidia GeForce 8800GT
After running the above and seeing how long it took we ran the exercise on a much more robust machine with the following specifications:
Dell Precision T5500
Intel Xeon CPU E5504@2.00GHz
8.00Gb of Ram
XP Professional x64 Service pack 2
The exercise took about 10 mins. on this machine. This is a very simple BOM for us. We previously used Mechanical 6 and it took only a fraction of the time to calculate this bom.
In the future we are planning on doing our drawings in a complete 3d environment with all of our 3d blocks having info points attached to them. We create platforms that are used to refurbish bridges so our future 3d drawings are going to be much larger than our current 2d drawings. I am hoping to find a solution to this problem now so we will not waste time in the future calculating bill of materials.