bolted connection naming problem

[csnyder750]

The company i work for has 9 people who use inventor. We each access a server to store our projects and files on. my project could involve using parts from several different projects. the problem we have been having lately is with bolted connection and its generic naming. for instance i use a bolt and it saves it in a folder with my assemblys name on it and then in that folder is a folder called design accelerator. inside the folder is where it saves all the bolted connection 1 or bolted connection 2 etc...

The problem lies when each of our projects have a bolted connection 1 in them. if we have to link jobs or work on projects that use parts from several members we have lots of bolted connection 1's which can cause linking issues.

What a couple of us were thinking is why doesn't inventor or is there a way to make inventor create one folder per project labled design accelerator and then lable the bolted connections with our project name-1 etc.

for instance the project im working on now is 116093. is there a way to get inventor to utilize this name and put a bc-1 after it. so it would be 116093-bc1 , 116093-bc2 etc. this way each bolted connection has a unique name? I know i can do a save copy and replace or go in and manually edit the names and relink everything. I just thought that we might be missing the boat per say on why inventor does what it does and if there is something we can do to make it not create such generic names.

[brendan.henderson]

I guess your not using Vault Workgroup or above as these have auto-numbering features that work perfectly for your needs.

Aside from that, assign each of your 9 users a number or letter and add that to the custom name you save the BC as. Then you would a 'distinguisher' meaning you might see multiple BoltedConnection1 but each would be prefixed with the assigned number/letter.

Vault WG or above is better though!

[rhasell]

Hi

This is the main reason why I don't use the Bolted Connection feature.

The BC can rename the files, but it becomes a real pain when you have a lot of connections to rename (Every time...). Also I use a lot of bolts, therefore I end up with thousands of BoltedConnection1 files.

My Solution to the problem:

Create a directory for your fasteners and create Bolt/Washer/Nut Sub Assemblies. My naming is the Bolt Size x Grip length.

E.G   M16x24.iam

(Contents M16X50 bolt + M16 Washer + M16 Nut with a 24mm contraint.)

You will be surprised on how soon you populate this directory, and how usefull it is. The only down side it placing a few hundred bolts at a time can become really painfull.

[csnyder750]

No we are not using vault. We currently had our reps in here discussing vault but it sounds like such a large investment at this point. I have no voice in the matter of what we use as i am just a lowly designer. I have found some sort of work around for the bolted connection problem though. One of the things we hated was that it created a new folder in our project folder for every sub assembly that we used bolted connections in. So i start my project and create a folder called bolted connections. Then when i create a new bolted connection i am telling it to save it in this folder and giving it a name to use that uses my project number-bc1 bc2 etc.

This puts all of the bolts in one single folder and gives them all a unique name so i will never have 100 bolted connection 1 files in my project. I just wish this was more streamlined so that i didn't have to do this. It seems too simple that inventor just over looked making bolted connections user friendly.

When this company started using inventor they created a "standard parts library" where they stored all the bolts that they created. yes there is a folder that has close to 1000 bolts, washers, and nuts drawn up. we use to use that in insert them until we started using bolted connection. As we get more familiar with this software and bolted connections we find that it seems like things could have been made way better.

[cameron.florenceJMGNL]

Thank you for posting this issue back in 2013. Here we are in 2021 and its still a problem. Got caught out with this the other day with multiple Bolted Connections 1,2,3 etc. after a Pack n Go. It would be great if we could just set up an automatic prefix/suffix per project or at least for bolted connections and apply it when required. Until then I guess we'll have to manually add it to every bolted connection file name. 😪