Die Casting Question w/ respect to Pro/E

[design-engine]

I have a sort of pole question about how designers might handle the Pro/ENGINEER part in terms of Die Casting.

Is it necessary to include the pre-machined version in a drawing? I might suggest adding the machining operations towards the end of the feature tree so you can create a family table. One Generic and one offering the machining operations at the end... Curious if anyone does this or has another technique for managing the two instances of pre-machined and die cast versions...

What other things might one do with respect to the part database that make a die cast part?

I am teaching another two day die cast part design workshop starting in the morning and I am trying to get a discussion going ... then import more students into the mcadcentral forums discussions. ( I probably talked at least 20 designers into joining the forum this year)
Edited by: design-engine

 

[dgs]

There's been a lot of discussion of this over the years and I think a lot of folks are using inheritance features. The debate is whether you design the part you want and add the material for the casting, or design the casting and use cuts to produce what you want from it. There are arguments for both cases.

What we've done is simply model the final part and let the vendor determine what to add in areas to be machined. Of course, we work with the vendor to accurately produce a model that reflects what will be machined and what will be as cast, but ultimately I don't care what the as cast version looks like, only the final product.

If we were doing the casting in house, that would be different, but we're not.

 

[design-engine]

Thanks for the input.Comment more on inheritance features plz.


By the way Doug we are doing an alias rendering class this week and one of the students from Calphalon mentioned design central as proe surfacing gurus. Cool hu.



Edited by: design-engine

 

[spidernate]

Once upon a time, I worked for an automotive company that delt quite a bit with parts machined from forgings. We used the "model merge" technique. The end result is a forging model, and a machined model (or several) that references the forging model. There where locating datums on the forging that all the machining was driven from, this way the forging could change and not fail any machined features.

 

[dr_gallup]

I have done all three (family table, merge & inheritance). Of the 3, I find merge the most robust & the easiest to work with. You can always use a skeleton of the finished part in the casting or forging part. You can also combine the merge and family tables. I have a family of similar parts that start from 3 forgings in one family table, then the 10 finished parts are in another family table where the merged part is one of the columns in the table.

 

[[-Skint-]]

My scenario is similar to dougs in respect to letting the factory determine the machining stage etc, the part I give them is what I expect the final machined piece to look like. I am involved throughout the process however.


Your right in the fact that I leave all the machining processes as far down the model tree as possible, aslong as my design intent allows me too Sometimes I cock it right up though haha.

 

[SRINIVASANIYER1]

Thanks for the input.Comment more on inheritance features plz.

i hope this helps


[url]http://www.mcadcentral.com/proe/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=36 605&KW=SRINIVASANIYER1[/url]

 

[dgs]

Thanks for the input.Comment more on inheritance features plz.





By the way Doug we are doing an alias rendering class this week and one of the students from Calphalon mentioned design central as proe surfacing gurus. Cool hu.

That's nice to hear, thanks for passing it along.

I think that inheritance and the old merge are one and the same feature now. It basically plops the entire source model into the new model where you can add features to it. Depending on how you define it (I think), it either comes in as a single blob (merge feature) or as an expandable list of the original part's model tree. If the tree is present you can even define features and dimensions that are to be different than the source. The remainder is still tied to the source and will update with it. Pretty powerful stuff, some companies are using it in place of family tables.

 

[design-engine]

Well.... I messes ed around with publish (non publish) and inheritance. I am continually impressed with PTC with respect to top down design. Looks like the inheritance feature can let you vary dimensions like a family table. impressive!

 

[audctrl]

Where I am, we create two parts, a casting and a machining. Between the two we either use a Pub. Geom. or Merge (I prefer this method, guess I'm old school). About the only dimensions we show on the casting are the chucking locations for the machining. The math model is used by supplier. Our machining drawing will show the chucking locations as well as the dimensions for the machined features.
Edited by: audctrl

 

[dr_gallup]

Actually, that is why I prefer merge to inheritance, at least the way I use it. It seems to me if you are bringing in a part to do additional operations to it it should be exactly the same as the source part, otherwise you may have manufacturing problems. If I put forging A on my turning center to make part B I'd hate to find out it wasn't physically possible because someone had used a tweaked inheritance model.

 

[design-engine]

I administered that die casting class a couple times since posting this to the thread and tried all the techniques offered on this thread.

After experimenting with all the said techniques... I have to agree that inheritance is the way to go on managing machining operations.

There was a group of engineers talking about this on the exploder and it made me think of this post and I pointed them here to learn.
Edited by: design-engine

 

[audctrl]

Exactly Dr. Why not follow what is actually being done right.

 

[megaladon]

this is from our standards



Creating Machined Parts From Castings

 

[pjw]

Just for your info:


If you use merge technique, you could also produce an assembly with the original part and the new, machined part with the merge and show this in your drawing with the original unmachined part shown in phantom detail. This is useful for highlighting machining allowances. You could make a family table of this assembly if you needed to use more than one machined part / merged part.


Phil