I am in the beginning of upgrading one of our oldest productlines to be designed entirely in solid works. The reason for doingthis line is because almost all the parts can be designed usingstandard features or design tables. It is a good candidate forrules based design. We are also looking at using standard blanks inmanufacturing to reduce turn around on "custom" designs.

I am working on building a number of features for our designlibrary that are made with custom cutting tools or in fixtures.Currently most of these features are detailed on table drawing,when a new part is made in AutoCAD they just go out and drag inblocks that are created for each feature. The problem is going backto the blank concept if the blank, or custom cutting tool isupdated it never updates the drawings so we end up with a lot ofparts that are manufactured that don't look exactly like thedrawings.

What I want to do is create design library features that areactually detailed on a released drawing linked to the feature part.The features will also be linked as parents to the parts that theyare used on so if a tool or blank is revised we can go back andcheck all the "were used" instances.

Has anyone done something like this?
When you have nested table driven parts do you end up making largefiles with all the configurations that go into the parts?
In a PDM system when you revise one configuration of a table drivenpart does it want to rev every part built on every configurationthat uses that part?

Hope at least some of this makes sense.SolidworksParts And Features