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Using Family Tables To Drive Drawings in Wildfire 4.0

Hey everyone,

At work we have about 20,000 drawings and models of different assortments of gears. Some of these drawings are in different formats as we have changed drawing templates a few times. I have figured out how to use a family table to create the models of the gears but is there a way that after I make a model a drawing is automatically made for it? Right now I have it set up to where there is a drawing template with the views created but I still have to put in dimensions. I looked at the repeating region topic but we use one drawing that has a front view, right view, and Iso view up in the corner, so I cant have a big table on the drawing that could cause a machinist to read the wrong dimensions. My boss wants it to be in such a way were if we had a couple thousand drawings we wanted to update for example the finish from black oxide to clear zinc we could just do it in the table and that would update all of the drawings automatically. I'm not sure if you guys could follow this but any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You,
Zach
 
Zach,

I'm not sure I quite follow you but I have a few suggestions.

Once you have created a drawing of one of the family table parts then you can click towards the bottom of the drawing where it gives the model name. This allows you to change the model to a different family table instance. The dimensions will then reflect the new instance and you can save the drawing with an appropriate name.

I'm not sure about doing this automatically without Pro/Toolkit programming but there is a utility called Pro/Batch (https://www.ptcusercommunity.com/thread/39688) that might be worth looking into.

Sam
 
Ope the drawing of the generic. Do a save as of that drawing to the new instance name. Open that new drawing and do a Model/replace to the appropriate generic. Edit drawong parameters as appropriate, drawing done. You may need to add dimensions for features that were not in the generic.
 
I mostly do the rename drawing / change model routine but you can also put the family table values into a repeat region on the drawing and have it automatically populate. When I do this I display the drawing symbols on the views with the symbols changed from d1 to something meaningful like OA_LENGTH or NUM_TEETH (it's tough with the limited text options you have for symbols). This way you can have one drawing with all the info to make a large number of similar parts.
 

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