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mtonsager10-Marble
10-Marble
October 22, 2014
Question

Flexible Piping Sub-Assembly Inside Upper Level Assembly

  • October 22, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 1949 views

Hi All,

 

Hopefully you can help with the folllowing-

 

The Issue

My company uses Creo 2 and Teamcenter as a CAD vault. We have the Creo cabling and piping application. My issue concerns hose and wire representation as a piece part, inside an assembly and then inside a top level assembly. More specifically- I have PN 12345, 14 Ga insulated wire. I would like to save a model and drawing of this to the CAD vault. This 12345 is used inside 5 different assemblies however. 1 assembly needs the wire to be 10" long with 2 lugs, 1 assembly needs the wire to be 5" long with 1 lug. Both will need drawings and assemblies saved to the CAD vault as well. We take this structure one step further and place these assemblies into assembly and outline drawings, where the wire sometimes needs to be routed past different obstacles.

 

My Initial Thoughts

My first thought was to use the flexibility feature in this manner- define a curve at the PN 12345 level made up of say 5 points/coord sys, 2 at the connection points and 3 along the curve path. Each point would be defined with offset (initially 0) from the default planes. Then, insert this PN into an assembly and assemble the lugs to the end points. Then, place this assembly inside the top level assembly. The first point would be constrained to its mounting location and the rest of the points would be defined as flexible for all 3 offsets. The curve would then follow these mobile points. The issue with this process is the orientation of lug mounting surfaces based on just points and massive amounts of user effort/input to get all the points correct.

 

Perfect World Solution

The part number model and drawing would be a straight line hose or wire. The kit level drawings and models would all use the one wire/hose model but include differing lengths and connectors. Ideally the flexible length would show as qty for the wire in the BOM. The upper level assembly and drawing would show these kit level parts routed throughout the machine. For BOM, repeat region, and CAD vaulting purposes we cannot have multiple parts with the same PN.

 

Is there a better way to do this? Any suggestions? I suspect I'm not the only one who has to show 3 levels of wiring in this way...


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1 reply

D
dschenken1-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 22, 2014

Technically you don't have a part, you have a linear material. A part can be removed from one assembly and used without alteration in another. When the wire is cut and lugs are attached it is a unique assembly that should have its own part number.

I haven't seen a good scheme to handle the deformation of low level items differently at higher levels.

The usual alternative is to drive the BOM with report relations that look to see if there is an alternate number to use instead of the filename. The assembly ends up with ABC_Level_x_install but carries a parameter like actual_part_number = ABC to make the BOM look right.

You can more easily handle the lugs using coordinate systems; these encapsulate the cartesian and rotation offsets more easily than points do.

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