most efficient way to crowd a design with McMaster's nuts and bolts?

[maker9876]

If I leave out nuts and bolts from a design, often it leads to an oversight and thence regret.

But what's the most efficient way to do this without cluttering the design from a computational perspective and maintaining reliability?

Currently tend to:

a) import one of each nut, bolt etc. required from McMaster;

b) multiply them with a 1 dimensional rectangular pattern;

c) position/lock them using rigid joints;

d) just for luck do some rigid groups towards the end of the timeline, on the grounds that maybe this will help F360 understand it doesn't have to "think about" these components separated;

Should probably do the "make unselectable" trick?

I guess there are a lot of other ways of doing this.  Maybe even insert the finished assembly into a new file and add nuts and bolts there. What's best practice?

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

These all seem like sensible things to do.  A question on b) - do you make the pattern because you have an actual pattern of bolts?  If not, it might be more efficient just to create new instances for the number of instances you need using Copy/Paste, then join them with Rigid joints.  A pattern will need to be recomputed, so if it is in the timeline and doesn't need to be, I'd skip that.  I'm not sure if making them unselectable will help.  It might help with the performance of selection, but probably not much else.

A couple of other suggestions:

• many McMaster-Carr models are fully threaded.  If there is an option, choose an unthreaded version.  I've even gone in and removed the threads.  Modeled threads on bolts create a LOT of geometry that can slow down performance
• use Selection Sets to manage visibility of fasteners.  You can create a Selection Set of all the nuts/bolts/washers and use that to toggle visibility of all of them at once.  It requires some diligence to maintain the selection set, but can help manage visual clutter and graphics performance to be able to turn them off

[maker9876]

Thanks. That's really useful advice. (I'd been patterning simply because it seemed like a convenient and accountable way of creating a known number of copies.)

Incidentally have noticed that if one clicks on a McMaster component in the vertical browser (whatever it's called) then  it lights up OK in  the model but the instance in the Timeline (a group?)  is not highlighted. And  if you right-click and  use the "find in timeline" feature instead of  highlighting it in  the timeline it Expands the Group, which is easy to miss  since it's over in a flash. In  short, they're hard to find in a lengthy timeline!

[jeff_strater]

yes, I agree - there are some problems with McMaster - Carr integration, because of the group created.  In the past, I have bypassed the UI in Fusion, and just downloaded the STEP file from their site, and uploaded it to a separate design in my project (in a "fasteners" folder) and just inserted from there.  That also keeps the bulk of the fastener geometry out of your main design, and helps keep it a bit lighter.