CAD Forum

Hi Everyone,

Got a bit of a strange one I can't wrap my head around.

I've got an assembly (circular aluminium profile), that is split down the middle. There is a joining plate sub-assembly used here that secures each half together. The joining plate sub-assem has it's own master drawing that is modelled as a flat piece. The plate is then rolled in house to suit, using a bend plot. I'll try to outline what my problem is:

- In the main assembly, I've inserted the joining plate assembly, so it calls correctly in the BoM. It visually looks wrong in my drawings so to get around this, I've hidden it from certain views. This raises questions about how robust the drawings are as they do not reflect what is being built in a way.

- In order to give the correct bend plot, I've modelled a extrusion mimicking the plate in my profile, and then used that to show the correct radius. Then I've hidden this in my cut list.

In an ideal world, I want an assembly that can be used as a dummy model, but instead of calling up the dummy model in the BoM, it pulls the master part number.

There's a few more complexities to this, but I'll leave them for now. Cheers in advance for any help. Can send images if needed.

Quickly, I'll just mention why I cant use configurations or anything else in my master part. These drawings are going to be used for custom products, so in a way, I cant predict the future about what dimensions will be used. In addition to that, I'm trying to minimise the number of steps it takes to bring out a new product. So I'm reluctant to create a new drawing for each bend radius, that refers to the master drawing. Also, if I make a new drawing for each, the main joining plate assembly will not be called for in the BoM, which isn't ideal as we don't have an ERP system.

Apologies if this is over complicated. To summarise:

I need a dummy part that can be edited, that calls up a master part in the BoM instead of itself.

Can you show a picture?