Copy material from one part to another in an assembly

[karthur1]

I have a part that we changed the material to a "local" style material.  I now want to copy this material type to other parts in the assembly.  "Normally" I will do this using the BOM editor in the assembly by just selecting the field that I want to copy and then dragging it to where I want it (like you can do in Excel).

When I try this workflow on these parts, it will not change that column.  I also tried the iPropCopy and paste and that would not work either (BTW, this is a GREAT feature in IPW5). It is like something has the material for this part locked, but I can't find what it is.

I have not tried importing the material.  I have about 50 parts that I need to change to this material and the import would take the longest.

To see my issue open the assembly.  I want to copy the material from -1037 part to the other two in the assembly.

[mcgyvr]

Go back to the part with the local style and save it to the style library. Then it will be available for all..

Of course for some crazy reason you probably don't want that in your style library.. Then I believe you are SOL

[karthur1]

Yea, you are right... I'd rather not be editing my styles library every time a new material comes along.  If it was something I was using often, that would be different.

Even if it was added to the library, I am not so sure I could change the parts material type in the assembly BOM editor.

[mcgyvr]

The material is not "locked" as you say.. it is just held locally in the one part.. While the rest of your parts use the default style library.

[cwhetten]

If you want a material to show up in another part but you don't want to save it to your styles library, just export the material style, then import it into the other part.  This won't modify your style library since the style will only be saved locally to that individual part.  Unfortunately, if you want to use the material in a bunch of parts, you have to do this a bunch of times.  Depending on how many parts need the material style, you will have to decide whether it is worth saving it to your styles library or not.

If you do save it to your styles library, then YES you can use the drag copy function (like in excel) in the BOM editor.

-cwhetten

[Anonymous]

Just came across the same problem.

I added the material to the style library (which for me is read/write).I used the BOM editor to copy the material into the other parts in the assembly.

I opened a single part, or new part, and went into the style library and deleted the material from the library. The parts in the assembly are all unaffected by this as the new material is saved locally within them all.

[ChrisMitchell01]

If you don't want to save to the main material style library then you can use the Favorites library for this purpose too. That's unique to each individual user.

-Chris

[Xun.Zhang]

Hi,

You can also save a part/assembly file to template which contains high frequency used material assets.

The other way is, try to set the default library to your own library in project setting and restart Inventor, the customized materials will be ready for serve in time.

Hope it helps!