Casting and Machined Parts in Multiple Assemblies

[fgallagher]

I have an assembly, part number 14869805 which is the machined level for my castings/weldment.  The castings/weldment are in the subassembly 14869802 level.  I have three parts that are casted and welded, these are parts 94408108-01, 02, 03 which are shown in 14869802.  In these parts I have the machining done but have it suppressed as I was thinking there could be a way to show this on the top level machining 14869805 without doing assembly cuts and also making sure the weight changes from the casting/weldment to the machining correctly.  Any ideas how this can be done?  Do I need to move my machining cuts from the part level?

[StephenW]

Depending on what I need to show from a welding standpoint, I will do it in one of 2 ways (I think both require advanced assembly extension)

1. Make the assembly with the cast parts, then merge them all in to a single part. then do my machining on the merge part. The down side to this is there is the extra merge part in the weld assembly. The upside is you can easily detail the weldment assemble and replace components within the assembly and re-merge them in to the merge part

2. Use external merge to assemble the parts within a part (no assembly required) and then do all my machining on that part. The upside is there is no assembly in between. The downside is it's harder to replace parts. 

Either method you will need to be very careful what references you pick to do the final machining if you plan on replacing components at a later time.

[fgallagher]

Hello Steve,

Are you doing the merge with Boolean operations?

[StephenW]

Yes, Component - component operations -boolean operations for when I use the assembly operation, which is the most common way.

For the external merge method, it all done in a part file so it's Get Data-Merge/inheritance and then "assemble" the parts as external merges.

I wouldn't call either method "the best option" but when you have to do relatively complicated machining on an assembly of parts, it's way better than using assembly features.

[tbraxton]

This does not directly address your current situation but may be useful going forward. You may want to consider your workflow for this type of design. If you have advanced assembly module, I would propose creating a master model part that represents the finished weldment (inclusive of all secondary ops) and then split that off into the parts. This split can be done with merge or inheritance or copy geometry functionality.

The inheritance feature was added to Pro/E to support as cast/as machined models driven from a single master model part. It is different from merge in some ways so you need to be aware of how it works before using it.

I design parts as they would be put into service (as machined in your case) and then use inheritance function to add the machining stock for the as cast version.

At the part level you can use inheritance feature functionality to have an as cast and as machined version of the part as required. You would have a 3 levels of dependency from the master model to the as cast parts;

Master-> as machined->as cast

[manjunathrv]

We have the similar situation. What we do if follow how the assembly is practically fabricated and machined.

In our case we assemble the rough models in an assembly and then machine at assembly level.

Assemble - Weld- Machine