Help with massive assemblies.

[Rich05]

3000+ parts? Is this a job for SW or does it require moving to Catia?

also

restructuring file locations for several hundred drawings and parts, any sure fire way to keep the links? Is this done with SW Explorer? We need to consolidate the location of many parts the drawings are not in the same directory. Any good work flows anyone has established for this?

Thanks

[keebler303]

With a good computer solidworks will handle it. You want to use speedpak:
2010 SolidWorks Help - SpeedPak

Can't help you with the file management, never had to deal with that.

Matt

[PaulMakesThings]

At a mining equipment company I worked for, Bucyrus, we would commonly open assemblies of 5000 parts or more, many of them complex. The machine would take a while to load it but it was stable enough, it slowed down a little changing views. That was my computer with 2 GB of ram and a processor with 2 cores at 2.4 ghz. The really nice graphics workstations did it with no slowdown at all, but I think they had high end quad core processors and nvidia quadro graphics cards which I don't know the specs on.

[Mike 1948]

3000+ parts? Is this a job for SW or does it require moving to Catia?

also

restructuring file locations for several hundred drawings and parts, any sure fire way to keep the links? Is this done with SW Explorer? We need to consolidate the location of many parts the drawings are not in the same directory. Any good work flows anyone has established for this?

Thanks

SWX Explorer should be able to find all references and copy them to a different directory.

Mike

[Rich05]

Hi Mike ,
When you say copy you mean just copy and paste in SW explorer?

[Mike 1948]

Hi Mike ,
When you say copy you mean just copy and paste in SW explorer?

Right click the assembly or drawing that contains all the parts and you should get a option for "pack & go". Choose the options you want and the new folder.

Mike

[fatal-exception]

Always use pack and go. It's the only reliable way to copy whole assemblies. You can also do this right through Solidworks.

Paul

[mechengineer]

I hate to revive a dead thread (not sure if this is considered dead).

As far as restructuring goes, if:
- you need to move everything (all parts, assemblies, drawings), use pack adn go like everyone above said.
- you are just moving things around and creating new folders, Solidworks Explorer is perfect for this.

When you are ready to move it all to a new folder / machine, use pack and go again. I've experienced that putting an entire assembly within the same base folder and no other assemblies with it confuses the pack and go feature a lot less. There are instances where Pack and Go "forgot" a relation that a feature had with another feature within a part. In another instance, a part refused to open and I got a "corruption" error message! Luckily I just opened up the pack and go that I saved from the day before and I just had to apply any changes since then. It beats starting the part over!