Flexible parts/assemblies, best approach?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am setting up an inventor system for drill pipe, which are now drawn in Autocad.

The drill pipe consits of roughly the following items:

- Drill pipe (different diameters, wall thickness and length)

- Drive cams (fixed dimension)

- Lifting eyes (evenly spaced on the wall, for horizontal lifting)

- Drill head

- Lid (adaptive to inside pipe diameter)

I've made an excel that allows my colleagues to enter several variables like:

- pipe diameter (between 200 and 1000mm, about 20 different sizes)

- pipe wall thickness (between 6-15mm, about 10 different sizes)

- pipe length (anywhere between 3000 and 25000mm)

etc

All in all hundreds of variations a year.

This approach is loved by my colleagues, as they are more familiar with Excel than Inventor. Excel also allows me to include remarks etc. This excel is used as a linked parameter list in the parts and assembly. This works perfect, but the drill heads causing me problems. The heads are cast iron, and there are about 10 different sizes based on the diameter of the pipe. Ideally I would like to include the right drill head type based on the excel(pipe diameter), and constrain it to the pipe end based on the excel(pipe length). This seems difficult (impossible?).  The current solution is that I 've inserted all 10 drill heads, and manually enable/make visible the right one, and disable the rest. This is not ideal.

What would be the best approach to do this?

- Make the assembly based on excel, and insert/constrain the right drill head manually

- Place the right one based on excel?

- Use Iparts / Iassemblies?

Iparts and Iassemblies are new to me, and my feeling is that this is much more difficult to understand for me and the rest.

The overall idea is that the assembly is used in a drawing, with BOM, dimensions, weld symbols etc. For a following project I would like to copy the folder (parts, excel, assembly) to a new project, and modify the excel the quickly generate the assembly ánd drawing.

Ideally I would like to select the variables and the type of drill head, and generate an assembly and drawing as simple, easy, quickly (but automatically) as possiblle

Thank you in advance for your suggestions on the best approach.

Best regards,

[Sergio.D.Suárez]

Hi, This seems to be an interesting topic.
With your initial approach of hiding turning on components within the assembly you could have many problems. For example with the list of materials. You would have many components that are not really part of your real assembly. This will then affect the mass, and this will affect the center of gravity (much requested in many large jobs).
The first accessible path is as you mention ipart and iassemblys. Setting the type of each component can be very effective. Beware of changing file names after the ipart types have been generated for example (so that there are no problems with the ipart folders before renaming).
You should control the entire workflow from the main excel. This will become a laborious task.
Another possible way is to make a design copy of ilogic.
This is to create the first project configuration with its respective excel and encode it properly, then make the ilogic design copy and correct this second assembly, and so on.
If the ilogic design copy gives you problems, you can try to manually copy the entire folder of your project, looking for a way to duplicate this project (you should see the workflow you do)
In order to find the most suitable way, perhaps you should ask yourself how your company manages the projects, if you keep them well coded to differentiate the work of the clients, or if you maintain a unique general code and you are doing the work changing its components (something that It would seem uncommon since it is usually tried to maintain a certain work history per client).
I hope I have been a little clear. We are attentive to your doubts, if possible share some images so that others can correctly interpret your problem. regards

[Anonymous]

Hello Sergio,

Thank you very much for your reply. I will investigate the options that you suggested.

For now I have some clarifications that might be worth mentioning.

- We don't use the vault

- There are only a few people making (generating)  the assemblies

- The assemblies are not distributed to other companies, but the drawings sometimes are.

I like the idea of copying the entire folder (with the parts, project file, excel, assembly etc) to a project folder if another pipe has to be drawn/generated.

I'll have to check if it's ok to share files/images.

Thank you again.

[el_jefe_de_steak]

In my experience, this is exactly what iParts and iAssemblies are made for. You can drive everything from an excel spreadsheet. Although these are complicated to learn, when properly set up it is really easy to create hundreds of variations in a short period of time. I myself am not well versed in using iParts and iAssemblies, but have seen how powerful they can be.

If your colleagues do not have access to Inventor, do a "save as" of the excel spreadsheet that you can access from the iPart/iAssembly and have them enter values as needed. You can then copy-paste them into the spreadsheet through Inventor. There may be a way for them to edit the excel spreadsheet as well outside of Inventor, but my experience with this is limited.

[Anonymous]

After a bit of trial and error, I now use the library.

The excel updates all parts, assemblies and constraints.

The drill heads have to be replaced depending on the pipe diameter.

I've placed the variants in a folder, and use that as a library.

When the drill head needs to be replaced, I use ctrl-H (or replace), and select another version from the library. The offset for the different heads are coming from the excel too.

This workflow is simple, making it easy for everybody to understand.

Thank you for all your thoughts.