2 out Sheet Metal Parts

[mark_eilers]

We do sheet metal roll forming.  We have some parts that are manufactured 2-out, meaning the same profile is made side by side then cut apart to make 2 of the same parts.  Currently we make an assembly of the part flat to make manufacturing drawings.  We are wanting to transition to using hole tables on our drawings, but I can not find how to add a hole table to an assembly drawing.  Does anyone have a way to better show a 2 out flat instead of making an assembly of the 2 flats?  I would like to stick with the one part file so everything stays associated with the part.

[tbraxton]

I assume you have a flat pattern for a single part. Model the flat pattern with 2 parts in the same model (part). You should be able to use a single part as a master model to drive the flat pattern with 2X parts. This would allow any change to the single part design to update the flat pattern with multiple parts.

If you have the advanced assembly extension use one of the top down tools to propagate the single part into another derivative part that represents 2 parts in the flat pattern.

With this approach you can use a merge, inheritance, or a copy geometry approach to add the geometry to the flat pattern

[Pettersson]

I played around a bit myself. Thought of mirroring the geometry or using inheritance, but it doesn't preserve the intelligence required for a hole table. the only solution I found was grouping the entire model tree and patterning it. Not a very elegant solution, and it might create a headache for whomever is going to edit it later.

An even messier approach could be to make the hole table for the part, export it to CSV, have Excel duplicate it and save it out to CSV again, then import it into your drawing. A lot of that could be automated by mapkeys and Excel macros, but it's hardly smooth.

You could automate it even more if you use the VB API, however. That requires some programming in VBA, though. I'm pretty sure you could make an Excel macro that find all holes and their coordinates, lists them in a table, duplicates the table, adding some value to the X coordinate based on the location of a datum plane used to assemble the copy, then inserts it as a table in the drawing. I think all that can be done without a Toolkit license.

I'm not super satisfied with either of those answers, but that's the best I could come up with.