Derived Sheet Metal
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I originally posted this in the main forum, and someone suggested I post something here.
I have a situation where we order flat sheet metal pieces with a cutout in the center in mass quantities ("Part A"). These flat pieces are then modified in several different fashions, and then all are bent into a common "C" shape. So for every 50 flat metal pieces ("Part A") that we start with, we end up with fifty formed pieces, although two have the NE corner clipped ("Part B"), two have the NW corner clipped ("Part C"), two have the SE corner clipped ("Part D"), two have the SW corner clipped ("Part E"), three have a second hole punched into them ("Part F"), and the remaining 39 have no secondary modifications ("Part G"). Parts B thru G are all used in an upper level weldment, an all have the same bent cross-section.
So I created Part A as a flat part with folds in it to create the final C-shape. This allows me to place the flat view in the IDW for purchasing reasons, and I added folds to create the final "C" shape needed by Parts B thru G. (I dislike folds, but in this case, I need to retain the overall size of the flat, so creating the part with flanges woul dmake the flat size dependent on the bend tables, which won't work).
I then created Parts B thru G as derived parts, using Part A as the source file. This allowed me to add the cutting modifications required by each - the cuts are straight lines in the flat pattern - and create a flat view as necessary for each. This worked out great from a modelling standpoint, but I cannot figure out how to get Parts B thu G to identify that Part A is their child in their Bill of Material. I could force the value, but my concern is that when I need to Copy Design these parts into a new "family", the part number of the source flat would need to be manually edited in each to ensure the correct flat part is ordered, and that seems like a recipe for disaster.
Any suggestions? Two files are attached - "Part A" is the source file and "Part B" is the first modified file.
We typically have an iProperty field in the Custom tab where we can force a "child" for a bill of material. Ideally it would ne beat to have iLogic or something pull the part number from the Part A file and insert it into the iProperty field of the Part B file. We currently have fourteen "Part A" in our system, each of which is used in at least one set of "Part B thru G" sets.
