Survey of Standars & Best Practices

[abrazors]

Our company is working to update our CAD standards and best practices. We are interested in discoveringthe top standards and/or best practices employed by ProE users. If interested in contributing, please list the top 5 best practices and/or CAD standards in use at your company. Please be brief, but descriptive enough to convey the idea.
Edited by: abrazors

 

[mardeb]

We are starting the same sort of project here too. In support of our efforts, we are also investigating ModelCheck to help with our STDS and Best Practices.


Top 5:


Modelcheck: Configure it and use it to support your internal STDS and BP's


Common or standard start parts, formats, templates, symbols, mapkeys, etc... Define company wide common objects, set up the config.pro options to them, have everyone use them, and so on.


Design Intent (design with intent in mind) Not the easiest way to model, not the way the tool room wants it, but how the part will actually be used and build the model so it behaves the way it is supposed to from a design POV. (For example, If I lengthen the part, should this hole change with the length or stay put?)


Use model (shown) dimensions for 80% plus of drawing dimensions


Clean models: No errors, geom checks, suppressed orincomplete features, circular references, etc...


- marc

 

[jdurston]

To elaborate on the start parts (templates) and formats.. The key components of the part and assembly template is having


1) A standard set of parameters. (Decide on which of these would be "designated" for your database system if necessary*).. If you want to take it further, you can create a standard set of relations to establish parameters based on mass properties like weight or volume(or alternativelyit can be done with analysis feature in the footer..)


*- parameters that you can bring over to your database help with the searching of parts which will hopefully reduce duplication in modelling as you'll be able to find existing parts much easier.


2) A standard set of namedviews which you can use to quickly orient your part/assembly, or use to place views on your drawing. You can even set up your drawing template to place views using these named orientations.


3) Standard features. Usually, default datum planes and default csys is fine (which is what you get out of the box), but you might want to add other features.


4) Units. Your template will determine your units. Do you design in mm or in? or both? (If so, you may need to have multiple templates.)


It helps if you have mapkeys to help support this as well. You need to be able to convert "non-standard" parts to "standard" parts.


Taking the concept of "start parts" further, if you have parts that are very similar in form, and you always begin to model them the same way, you can create "seed" parts to copy from. They can also have drawings already started too. We do a lot of parts that are similar to a sheetmetal box; so, why not copy an existing box rather than start from scratch? This will not only speed up the modelling process, but the beginning of these models will at least start out being identical to each other. The key is coming up with "seed parts" which are designed clean and flexible to be modified.


Flexibility for modification is much more important than speed of creation. You will spend much more time modifying something than creating it. Capturing design intent along the way is paramount.