We are facing a problem with sheetmetal. I need the surface area, overall length/breadth of the blank shape of the part. Also the Description of the part should be like "Name x length x breadth x thickness". Now it is possible by using feature parameters in "Flat Pattern". But all the sheetmetal parts in the assembly have unflatten parts (family table instance without flat pattern). All the parts are connected to skelton and updated when the parameters in skelton changed.
But the problem starts when we update the skelton. As the "flat pattern" feature is suppressed in the instances used to create the assembly, the corresponding parameters will not get updated and thereby the Surface Area, Length, Width & Description in BOM is not updating.
We tried the below methods to solve the problem.
1) Open each sheetmetal parts - resume the "flat pattern" - regenerate - suppress - save
But this is a time consuming work and it kills the entire concept of automation. Again manual error happens a lot as the users miss some parts
2) We create unbend all - measure length - save as feature - measure width - save as feature - bend back all.
Then we use the parameters in the measure feature to create the required output. But this method is tiresome to build as we have some 50-60 sheetmetal parts in an assembly and we have to create approx 750 assemblies.
Can anybody suggest a method to find the overall length/width of blank shape (available in flat preview) and connect it to some part parameters without using flat pattern or unbend-measure
Regards
Basil Paulose