When performing top down modeling

[michaelpaul]

using a skeleton, what do you do when you are out of the R&D phase and tools have been built? do you keep all of the dependencies in place or do you break them?

I have been working on an electronic enclosure. I have a skeleton that has the profiles of my housing parts, PCB, keypad key sizes and locations, etc. and each individual part has copy geometry pointing back to geometry published from the skeleton. this works great and my model updates with east.

But, now that I'm in tooling should I attempt to break these links? Basically, I may not wish to have every single feature move dependently in my models now that I have physical parts. a change to the housing could change my PCB diameter and while I may consciously be changing my plastic housing I may not want my PCB to change becasue we aren't going to update it. If I leave the dependencies intact, somebody in the future may change the model and not know that the PCB also changed creating a model/print that is out of sync and incorrect with the actual part. breaking the links would cure this problem so it seems logical.

granted, my assembly is on the simpler side of things but I'm curious to know what others are doing to prevent accidental CAD changes in the future when things are heavily linked.

Thanks

Michael

 

[dgs]

In the past, I've set my copy geoms to 'independent' once tools were built. That way I can make changes in a more targeted way, but if a larger, assy wide change is needed, I can turn them back on to perform that. Of course, if the copy geoms have been turned off for some time and through a few changes, turning them back on could be catastrophic. That may argue for freezing the skeleton and the copy geoms for good once parts are tooled.

The bigger thing would be to create some kind of agreed upon process for your team so that everyone understands what should be happening when.