Need an alternative to iParts AND Inventor Library parts?

[boilerchip]

Just my opinion, and for my company it works very well, but of course we are well organized, model everything yourself. It takes about 2 minutes to model a "master nut" file, that can be copied and modified quite easily. We model every single part that goes on our machines, period. It took us about 2 days to model the majority of our hardware, and adding new hardware is easy with the master out there to modify.

We also were not thrilled with iParts because they toted unneeded information along with them, and they require us to always point our project files to their parent part. This is the major problem for us. A slow server and tons of fastners in an assembly make this less than ideal. If the darn things were independant, we might have used them, but I doubt it.

I suppose if we were using plumbing on something difficult to model, we might change our tunes, but with simple parts, we like to keep them as simple as possible and do them ourselves.

[Anonymous]

That is a viable option, and I've used it with good
success.  When I first tried iParts, they gave me so much trouble that I
abandoned them and did what you're doing.  I don't know whether it was lack
of knowledge on my part, or glitches in iParts that have since been fixed, but
I'm having less trouble with them now.  I did it with plumbing parts;
they're not that hard to model.

Even now, every so often my iParts glitch.  I
haven't changed anything in my project paths, but there are a couple of washer
iPart families that Inventor has just lost track of for some reason.  This
has happened twice; I will open an assembly that was working fine the last time
I opened it, and it will error out, telling me it can't find the flat
washers.  When I point it to them (they're right there, dummy!)
it insists that they're not the same ones and if I replace the
originals all my constraints will be lost (!).

One more of those little games, and I might just be
dumping iParts, and going back to the 'save copy as' routine again,
too.

Walt

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"boilerchip" <
href="mailto:chip@liftaloft.com">chip@liftaloft.com> wrote in message

href="news:f141e27.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb">news:f141e27.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...

Just
my opinion, and for my company it works very well, but of course we are well
organized, model everything yourself. It takes about 2 minutes to model a
"master nut" file, that can be copied and modified quite easily. We model
every single part that goes on our machines, period. It took us about 2 days
to model the majority of our hardware, and adding new hardware is easy with
the master out there to modify.

We also were not thrilled with iParts because they toted unneeded
information along with them, and they require us to always point our project
files to their parent part. This is the major problem for us. A slow server
and tons of fastners in an assembly make this less than ideal. If the darn
things were independant, we might have used them, but I doubt it.

I suppose if we were using plumbing on something difficult to model, we
might change our tunes, but with simple parts, we like to keep them as simple
as possible and do them ourselves.