change over insert creation

[Tesla77]

I have a mold to design that will make 4 different parts. Each part is similar but will need to have a change over insert to make the different part detail.
I can extract the changeover insert for part-1 and that's fine. I can then make a family table of the 4 inserts.
But to create the changing detail for the other 3 parts I fill in the detail on the change over insert and do a seed and boundary of the part model ( Part-2, Part-3, Part-4) and solidify the changes to the proper family tabled insert.

What is the best way to create change over inserts in a mold design?

 

[moldman]

What I usually do is split out one version of the part. I then clone the mold file and redo the splits on the other parts in their own individual mold files. I suppose if you wanted to, you could create the parting surfaces as a separate part that is assembled to the mold file, and then this same part is assembled to all the other mold files. That way, if you had to change the parting surfaces, you only have to do it once. The resulting insert is not a family table though. If that's what you really want, you could assemble an empty part into the mold assembly, merge the extract to it and make that merge feature an item in the family table. That same part would be assembled to all the mold files and similar merges could happen. This could get cumbersome if there were a lot of different features after the merge for each version of the part. Incidentally, I don't assemble the mold file into the mold base assembly. I create a stack assembly that has all the versions of the insert assembled. Then, with simplified reps you can show each different version of the mold to accommodate non-similar water, ejection, etc.

Bottom line is, these jobs don't come around very often, so however you figure out to deal with it best is up to you. A lot depends on how much different the geometry is.

The only hard, fast, rule is there is no hard, fast, rule.