Looking for ideas on building a part library

[spencer]

I've been fighting with getting some components built as some kind of library setup for a while, but have essentially hit a wall and was hoping to hear other peoples' input/experiences. We'll see if I can organize this in a cohesive way.

Goal is to create some sort of library for paint fittings we frequently use

Why:

• To be able to easily insert parts that are well-defined 
• To be able to swap out fittings in-place, primarily for size changes
• To have useful descriptions/stock numbers/BOM callouts on said parts
• To have accurate geometry on parts, due to space constraints we typically deal with
• To stop messing up these fittings because of the number of details to juggle and mistakes that slip in

What I have:

• Solid body files from the manufacturer
• These files do not encompass all products though, but everything can essentially be broken down into smaller components and reassembled into different products
• Some products with different part numbers are actually identical, primarily fittings for some sizes of metric and standard tube. In these cases, I would want to insert them as the 'actual' part, but simplify ordering by getting the 'standard' part

What I have tried:

Dumping imported fittings into a folder, opening them and applying tweaks for usability

• Fairly time-consuming
• Becomes an absolute mess if a tweak is wrong or needs to be changed
• Does not help for products without models
• Absolute nightmare swapping fittings out in other assemblies (ie. Changing hose size, making a metric version, etc), as all constraints + tube and pipe will completely break

Making one table-driven 'Master' part

• Seemed like a good idea, was a convoluted nightmare
• Then tried to incorporate different fitting types, which did not go well. At all

Making several table-driven 'Master' parts

• Resulted in several convoluted nightmares
• Updating/tweaking/adding new entries in them has become a lesson in futility

Turning the smaller components into iFeatures

• Could re-use identical features in different table-driven parts
• However, iFeatures would always break and become unusable once the part got more complex, which I spent ages try to find the cause of but never could

Currently I'm bouncing around the idea of making table-driven parts out of the sub-components, as well as a table-driven 'frame' part to have some fixed work points/axes/planes for the sub-components to be constrained to.

That should allow me to re-use the sub-components more effectively, though with them being an assembly I won't be able to fully utilize the content center for them

Addendum: The earlier-mentioned tweaks I make to the parts

• Set proper part number, stock number, material, etc to the parts
• Apply a color-override to the fittings (Does not work with table-driven things unfortunately), basically I'll change the colors of the threads, Red for NPT, Blue for NPS, Green for BSPT, and use different shades for each size
• Add iMates at appropriate locations, often having to slice the modeled threads with a workplane
• For the iMates, add names as well as an offset to ensure that only matching iMates can physically be attached to each other (ie. 3/8" NPT fittings get a 0.003751 offset, 3/8" NPS get a 0.003752 offset, and Inventor does not allow iMates to attach if they have different offsets)

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I am sorry if I miss it. It does not look like you have tried publishing iPart to Content Center. This is a very widely adopted workflow in our customer base. They build iParts and publish the parts to Content Center Library. The part can be inserted as individual parts in an assembly without the need to manage a factory iPart and its members.

Many thanks!

[spencer]

My hope is to put the part in the content center, but it's the creation of a robust enough iPart that has been throwing me for a loop.