Working with Large Assemblies’ Tips & Tricks

 

You are here because you are looking for some tips & tricks that can help you speed up your workflow when working with large assemblies. Yes you are in the right place.

Actually the assembly in the following screen capture is 183,714 components with 264,653 bodies and Solidworks can handle it and more with no problems at all.
 

So what is the secret?

To answer this question, please read the following blog

 

Large Assemblies’ Pains

 

1- Long opening and  saving time

2- Long-time creating assembly drawings

3-  Low performance with limited computer resources

4- Hard to share within the team or externally between customers and suppliers.

 

Solution

 

1-First and last recommendation, don’t work on large assemblies and drawings over the network. Always have your Solidworks files on your local drive unless you are using a data management solution.

 

2- Use Lightweight Mode to open and work on large assemblies and assembly drawings.

3- Set your Solidworks Assembly Options to automaticuse Large Assembly Mode when loading large assemblies based on the number of components in your assembly.

4- Make sure that the files for all the components of the assembly have been updated to the latest version of Solidworks. You can use theAssembly Xpert tool under the Evaluate command manager to make sure that this is the case.

5-Freeze the finished components in your assembly, this will reduce the rebuilding time.

6- Make sure that you have fully defined assembly, and all the assembly’s  mates are resolved.

 

7- If you are only opening your assembly to navigate, measure, create cross section, hide/show components or create a walk through, Then it is recommended to load your
assembly using Large Design Review.

8- Always break your assembly into subassemblies, it is better to have 1,000 components in 10 subassemblies than to have them in the main level assembly.

 

9- If possible try to limit the in-context modelling and the assembly features.