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Flexibility within Assemblies

moregan
1-Newbie

Flexibility within Assemblies

Hi all,

I'm using WF4, and this is a problem that has plagued me for some time.

Flexibility is a useful feature, and I use it fairly regularly. Flexibility within a component is effective and fairly straightforward. However, I would like to take a sub-assembly that has about ten parts and establish flexibility within this sub-assembly. The part is an adjustable width brace. The problem I run into, is that when I'm trying to define the flexible dimensions, I can't access the assembly definitions. I can click the individual parts and make their dimensions flexible, but I would like to make the distance between the parts flexible, not the size of the parts themselves.

I know that there is a solution to this, as a predecessor of mine had accomplished exactly this, however I cannot replicate it and it is incredibly frustrating not knowing why. I'm sure there is probably some very simple explanation, however, all the material I can find about flexible components pertains to generating and maintaining flexibility within individual parts, and not within the context of assemblies, which is the result of the difficulty.


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2 REPLIES 2
psobejko
12-Amethyst
(To:moregan)

I've run into this before and my solution is to "query-select" and make sure you choose the "component" of this sub-assembly and not some feature of that component itself.

Suppose you are making "Dimensions" of SUB_ASSEMBLY flexible: query-select and choose the to-be-varied component (in the Pick From List, it will be a line item that looks like PART_NAME:CXXX(SUB_ASSEMBLY), where CXXX is the ID of the component), then the dimensions related to the component placement will show up.

I find that if you don't query-select, you are actually selecting some feature of the to-be-varied component (in the Pick From List, it would be a line item that looks like PART_NAME:FXXX(EXTRUDE_1), where FXXX is the ID of the feature).

Another method is to use the "Find" function and look for dimensions in the sub-assembly that you are trying to make flexible.  Again, look for the ones that have (COMPONENT) at the end of their name.

Hello Paul,

Great post.  You can also define the flexibility at the sub-assembly level so that whenever someone assembles this sub-assembly into a using assembly, the user will be prompted "Model <model name> has pre-defined flexibility.  Would you like to use it for flexible component definition?"

In my test, the only way to select the dimension in Creo 2 M120 was to use the CTRL-F find function.

Best regards,

- Jim

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