Bolted Connection: pros and cons

[brad]

Despite using Inventor for 10 years, I've never used the "Bolted Connection" feature (beyond just experimenting).

If this feature is the real deal, it should save a tons of design time. 

A few questions:

1. How do the holes stay "lined up" between the part files?  Does it use some flavor of adaptivity?  I've taken the advice of many and stayed away from adaptivity (in favor of derived parts and now multibody).   What I am getting at, do bolted connections take lots of computing power, like adaptivity seems to?  Are they lean, like derived parts?  Or somewhere in between?

2. After part changes the bolted connection in the browser has a lightning bolt.  I can "edit" the bolt connection and click OK to fix it.  Any way to automate that?

3.  Any other general pitfalls or tips with bolted connections?

Thanks very much!

-Bradley Bruns

Inventor series 2012

Windows 7

Dell XPS

8GB Ram,  Intel i7-263QM CPU @ 2.00GHz