Drawing Standards

Nigel, why has your engine not got any wings and a prop on the front?

Anyway, onto the autocrap conversation - the reason we still have autocad in engineering is due to the skinflint subby shops that cant cover the cost of the software and the time to learn how to use it (minimal) or due to long in the tooth design office managers who are too stubborn to wake up and smell the coffee.

You can also have as many layers as you want in Solidworks (are you talking multi sheet or multi layer, either way the export function is pretty flexible if you know what you want and what you are doing) if you really have to deal with subbys who "insist" on dwg or dxf, but they generally want paper drawings anyway, or fax if they are modern....

Please see above for a solidworks dimensioned compound angle c/w strange angled sides and awkward to machine hole in the middle! - all done without a single bit of command line funny talk! Out of interest, that little model took about 15 min to draw and come with full associativety - if I decide I got a bit the wrong size, I just change the dimension to the new size and the drawing changes as well - you don't get that with autowatsit

Mark

The company I work for will only send out pdf 2D drawings. The reason is fairly simple - we sent out casting models to help one supplier, who promptly made the patterns from those models, sand cast the objects and sent them back to us as finished items. Every dimension was out of tolerance as the supplier hadn't scaled the model to allow for casting shrinkage and not once had they referred to the drawing. Now, because we want the finished article to look like the drawing, we only send out the drawing.

DXF's are only created on request only for profiles.

Regards,

Richard.

Richard, if you sent out models for cast parts, how come you didn't send configurations with shrinkage added? Seems a bit unfair to dump the advanced technology for the sake of a communication issue. I use sheet metal on occasion and it always takes a bit of testing to get the bend factor correct to suit a particular fabricator and his tooling but they would rather do a few test bends and have profiles they can cut cnc than do it all manually (the fabricators seem to be more comfortable with cnc than the machine shops - perhaps is a cost thing?).

Mark

I too used Autocad for more years than I care to remember, then in 2005 I was let loose on Solidworks. Our company does mainly sheet metal, a lot of fabrication and a fair amount of machining.

There is NOTHING that I would even consider using Autocad for except the odd pneumatic schematic drawing perhaps.

Use Solidworks in the way it is intended and put your Autocad discs in the drawer with DOS etc.

Phil

Mark,

The company I work for makes boxes. Fancy boxes for satellites & such, but they are boxes. We are not foundry specialists, which is why we go to a foundry so they can overlay their expertise on our finished shape. We do not expect the foundry to treat our finished parts as the pattern. Having cost the company thousands due to delays in testing and delivery, it's not a mistake that we are going to permit twice.

Edited to add: Also, how much shrinkage is there on the new EN version of AB2? I have no idea & it's not quoted in any standard we have. We need the foundry to put their experise in here as well as where to put the sprues.

Regards,

Richard.

Edited By Richard Williams 7 on 02/06/2013 17:39:27

Richard,

Was not having a go at you, it just appears that if both parties (you obviously understand the shrinkage issue especially if you are doing molds) knew there would be shrinkage, someone ought to have asked the question - has shrinkage been allowed for, can we use the model as is, do we just need to add the casting features etc.? It sounds like they might have been doing it for the first time also, or had not long taken the technology on.

It still sounds like communication and it is a shame that the technology will not be adopted especially if you are making expensive, fast turnaround tooling as it would speed things up considerably and probably drive down cost as well.

Mark