Stitching surface components

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm modeling several objects that have some geometry in common and in order to try to speedup the modeling process I thought that it would be a good idea to model several surfaces and convert them to components to later insert in other files.

The main problem that I'm facing is that when I insert those surface components I cannot find a way to stitch them all together.

I thought that components could be useful for this sort of operations but it seems that they are more useful to be used in more common assemblies of solid components.

Can someone please clarify if I can't really stitch two surfaces together if they belong to a diferent component?

I tried to unlink but the geometry gets damaged in process because some features are lost.

One last question that I have related to components is... How can I insert a component without the construction geometry of that component being also inserted?

Thank you advance for you help.

Best regards,

Carlos

[HughesTooling]

Have you broken the link after inserting into a new design, if the link is still there you can't edit the inserted components.

Mark 

[Phil.E]

Hi,

Inserted files are read only.

But you can copy the bodies inside them. So you can insert, and copy body. Paste into a new component. But the body will have no sketch.

The reason your body breaks when you break link is that you didn't use Activate Component when you made it. The sketch is at the root in the old component. To make parametrically complete components that can be copied to other designs intact, do this: Right Click the root of the browser, New Component, Activate the  component. Then make sketches and make bodies inside that component.

You can then stitch bodies that reside in two components, if you can break link cleanly because you made the copied part using Activate Component. The result will live in just one of the components, the other will be empty. But not linked read only components, they are read only.

For your last question, there is no way to do that. Inserted components are complete copies of the original component. Delete the construction geometry ahead of time, or turn off the visibility of it, or break link after insertion and use Remove to get rid of it.

Thanks,