Several Assemblie on One Drawing...

[Anonymous]

I work for a company making transducers, some of which come in multiple configurations requiring alternative components.

I have recently generated a drawing for one of these transducers by creating separate assemblies, one for all of the components to be referenced by the 'part detail' drawing, and assemblies for each of the configurations for this model of transducer. This means that the drawing is spread across separate files that each reference a separate assembly file, and are linked through name and the displayed sheet numbers only. This is not ideal as it opens up a higher risk of sheets being forgotten and not being updated in accordance with any changes/revisions that may occur, it also presents other minor inconveniences.

At the time of producing the aforementioned drawing I was unaware of the ability to 'suppress' features in the drawing space on Fusion 360, and I was also unaware of the ability to generate blank tables that could be manually populated with the BOM. There were also some other parts required that had been excluded from the original assemblies due to my having then been unaware of the features that could be used to generate the required shapes, these parts were the internal wires, their insulation sleeves, and welding pads. These parts have no formal design, and are both cut and fit into the device by hand, meaning that it wouldn't be expected to generate models for these parts, but would still be required on the BOM. It was also necessary to draw the wiring into the assembly models in order to ensure that they follow the correct path. It would present further issue with joining the wires and aligning them correctly if they were saved as separate components and inserted into an assembly. For this reason, I have drawn these components into the final assembly.

Today I generated a new drawing in an attempt to include all components and general assemblies of each configuration across several sheets in a single drawing file. The problem I have encountered is that when generating the BOM the table can be populated at will, but the balloons have auto-generated numbers still and cannot be overridden. In this example there are 4 possible configurations of this transducer, thus 4 general assembly sheets. After having generated each sheet with its respective BOM table, and neatly ordered the balloons, I noticed that each time I renumbered the balloons on one sheet, it would affect the numbering on other sheets, which in hindsight seems logical but I hadn't anticipated it.

I have tried to recitfy this by briefly un-suppressing the features from the assemblies that are not relevant to that configuration, generating balloons for each component and renumbering them accordingly, but this is extremely awkward, as the original assembly file has all 4 configurations lined up consecutively on the 'X' axis within the workspace of the assembly file. When I un-suppress all of the other features being referenced from the assembly file by the drawing that I am working on, it's not possible to generate the section views required to view all components in order to generate the balloons so that I can renumber them as a complete sequence; some of the wires have been drawn in in a different orientation due to certain configurations of the transducer having different entry points, which require them to be displayed with different orientations on their respective general assembly sheets! I'm sure if I was to change the referenced assembly file so that the separate configurations of the transducer model were not all in line on one axis it would be possible to get the section views required to have all components visible on one sheet, but as I said this is extremely awkward and complicated, and considering that it is likely I will have to use this method across all drawings going forward (3D capability has just come to our company, and I have been tasked with updating all 2D CAD drawings onto the 3D system), it will waste a lot of time as there will likely be further unforeseen complications when it comes to modelling other transducers and arranging the assemblies correctly in the workspace of the assembly files, which would waste even more time. Obviously all of this hassle would be saved by simply allowing the balloon entries to be overridden, but clearly that is not possible! I could go back and draw the wiring into the assemblies that were generated as separate files, which are referenced by separate files that are all labelled together as one drawing, but I would rather move towards having all sheets integrated as a single file. Is there anyone out there who has encountered similar problems and has found an easier/more convenient method to work around the limitations that I have presented here?

I have tried to be as detailed as possible, so I hope what I have written here makes sense to whoever reads it. Please let me know if there are things that I need to clarify further, or if you have a solution to my problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thank you for your time if you read this far!