I am working on a piece numbering system and need help with a macro or two. We have been manually updating/typing every piece mark into our drawing cutlist’s. This is probably the most time consuming part of our drawings as there are about 50-60 parts in each of our parts. We are a custom steel fabricator and typically only make things for custom runs and have no off the shelf parts in our operation. I was thinking about how we could improve the process and think it can be done with Macros although I don’t have the skill level to tackle something like this. I wanted to find a way to use the weldment profile design tables as it helps with the piece mark. I have added a cell in my weldment profile design table named “Prefix” and added a prefix such as ANG for angle, BM for beam, CHL for Channel etc. Anything created in sheet metal should be given a prefix of “PLT”
File Properties/Summary Information-
Job Number- B1361 (Manually chosen and created in file properties)
Sub Assembly- 10 (Manually chosen and created in file properties)
Weldments- CHL- (Channel), ANG- (Angle), BM- (Beam), HSS- (Tube) etc. These prefixes are entered onto the weldment design table at “\$PRP@Prefix” column.
Sheet Metal- All sheet metal plates are named PLT-01, PLT-03, PLT-05 etc
Piece Mark= 06-PLT-04, 60-PLT-01, 06-ANG-2, 06-CHL-3
On each weldment profile in the library I have added a Prefix- that I would like to use for my numbering system. So each of my piece marks would be ANG-01, ANG-02, ANG-04 for Angle or CHL-02, CHL-04 etc. for Channel. I would like all of my sheet metal parts to be piece marked as PLT-01,-03,-6 etc
In regard to the numbering, in a perfect world I would have all of the like shapes start at 0 and increase +1 for each additional common shape. However, I think that will be extremely time consuming and may be reaching too far with my macro goals. That said a simple numbering system serialized starting at 0 and increases +1 with additional items. Also need to address how we would handle items that are “Not included in cutlist” as these should not be counted.
Thanking you all in advance!
Jim
SolidworksApi/macros