Weldment Properties – Automated!

In the past…

The Weldment Cutlist property folders are fantastic at automatically creating the information required for a Cutlist or BOM. But it only works for Weldment bodies; if only everything could be a Weldment body! Unfortunately steel structures will always need cleats, flat bar stiffeners, base plates etc. Whilst it is possible to define flat bar Weldment profiles, in practice they can be difficult to make work. In the simple example below only 24 of the 52 bodies in the Part are Weldment bodies.
As a result, by default, the BOM looked like this:

The empty Cutlist property folders would have to be manually filled to complete the BOM. Whilst it is possible to make this parametric, by linking to model dimensions, many users, to save time, cut-corners by inputting text values. The BOM would no longer be parametric making drawing production prone to errors.

Then came along boundng boxes…

In SolidWorks 2013 “Bounding Boxes” were introduced. For non-Weldment bodies it worked out the minimum volume of a body and reported the: volume, length, width and thickness within the Weldment property folder. Bounding boxes are created with a right mouse button click on the Weldment table icon in the feature tree and selecting “Create Bounding Box”.

At a first glance it looks amazing. But there is a drawback it will assign the values to properties called: “3D-Bounding Box Thickness”, “3D-Bounding Box Width” & “3D-Bounding Box Length”. See below the typical contents of a Weldment property folder.

This information won’t immediately be recognised by existing Cutlist/BOM tables. So one-by-one the Bounding Box information has to be applied to the “Description” and “Length” properties. The situation is better than before, but still time consuming to set up.

Eureka…

A little known Weldment tool holds the key to realising the Bounding Box’s potential, speed up workflow and eliminate human error all in one hit! It’s the hidden away “Properties” option in the Weldment feature. It is accessed by right mouse button click on the Weldment feature at the top of the feature tree and selecting “Properties…”

Information created here is automatically propagated to each Weldment property folder. By setting this up correctly it will automate the Cutlist/BOM table values for non-Weldment bodies. It’s also possible to add other information, such as Weight and Material, as shown below.

To maximize the value of this a Part template should be set up so this information is included from the start. Otherwise the details above need to be added for each Part. Still a big time saving over before, but not as good as it could be.
On top it off the Weldment property folders in the feature tree now include the description for easy identification.

But conversely if the Bounding Box hasn’t been applied the value comes up as below. This acts as a useful reminder to apply the Bounding Box prior to creating the Drawing.

Summary

So, by setting up the Weldment feature properties correctly Weldment drawings will go from the one shown at the beginning to the one below with minimum effort by the draftsman. A genuine time saver and it eliminates errors in one hit.