from FamTab to Single and keep drawing

[AHA-D]

Time for the gurus to come out. I'm struggling with ProE's stubborn keeping hold of links.


The situation comes from designing related parts. The easy way of doing so is making the design of a variation as a famtab member in an existing file. The drawing is a piece of cake (it isn't but it's certainly faster than starting from scratch), just change family members.


But now comes the problem. As in any design there comes the time that you want to make the part a standalone part, because otherwise everything gets connected with everything else and there's no way telling by the filename what you're looking at.


I've found a way to get a standalone part created by renaming the famtab member (not sure whether I can repeat it, but I'll try). But there's NO WAY I can make the drawing refer to the standalone part, when it was made based on the famtab. Not by naming the drawing after the part, not by renaming with both in memory, ...


Anyone ?


Alex

 

[dr_gallup]

Open the drawing, then open the generic part. Delete the line in the family table containing the instance. Pro/E will warn you that the instance will no longer be table driven. Voila, stand alone part. You need to have assemblies in memory too, otherwise they will still be looking for an instance.

However, do you really want to break the table everytime? We have lots of production parts that are instances of family tables. It is much easier to make one change to a generic and have all the instances update than to have to find all the different stand-alone permutations and change them one at a time.

 

[AHA-D]

A


Thanks, will try out the way you suggest


B


The trouble with the famtabs here is that there aren't any changes that need to be run through the entire table, rather the contrary. The famtabs are used to design similar (connector)products but each with its own set of parameters. They all look alike but are dimensionally entirely different. Having them in famtabs makes it easy to modify an assembly of one kind into an entirely different product. The trouble starts when components get special modifications, old versions keep getting used in customer parts when new versions are in standard parts, components are used across product groups, etc. You soon end up in a part "jungle" where you don't know the impact of a change any longer. Standalone parts kept with the product they belong to clean up this mess.


Alex

 

[Dell_Boy]

Have you tried multi-layer family tables at both the part and assembly
level. This technique is great for breaking up very large table into
more managle chunks and isolating custom mods to a particular
section(s) of the overall table.



I have a similar requirement for chain sprockets, eg. chain pitch,
number of teeth, simplex - triplex, bore machining, hub shortenening, I
just keep adding another instance for whatever I need.



DB