Hi All,

I found a way of making a detached drawing of a virtual component that manually updates when the assy is open.

The creation and update process of the drawing is not simple (for the average user) but it IS possible.

You are probably wondering why would you want to do that?

I work as a CAD administrator where we have close to 60 SolidWorks users, and than another ~50 PDM users.

Our company is fairly big and we can't adopt a "Quick, agile, rapid design & deploy culture'. Meaning we have a lot of departments beside Engineering/Design, like Doc. controll, planning, purchasing, project management, machining, etc.

When designs takes shape, you have to label a "Component" with a number. This component could be just a simple part, or assy, or a purchased part, etc.

Now if you \\\$\\\$Trace\\\$\\\$ your simple part number that is generated by a designer, it cost the company money to track it, insert it into the ERP system, or appropriate BOR level, etc. flow it to the right destination/department and so on.. and so on... So the general idea is (*NOTE TO SOLIDWORKS*) : "Large companies will save a lot of money if you could get away from numbering your assy components all together. If you could create regular drawings of virtual components, that are fully referenced and in-context"

This is why we have heavily adopted the use of the WELDMENT environment. You create a part weldment with a lot of bodies and create drawings from the BODIES, without saving out the body as a seperate part.
The drawings of the bodies that we create have one number and then followed by -T01, -T02 etc. There is no part files in the PDM Vault, only SolidWorks drawings.

Basically the company saves money by minimizing the amount of numbers to process. But, there is a big downside to designing a complex assy in the weldment environment as a part. It is Hard! It is Tricky! It is Limited!, Sometimes it becomes a configuration nightmare and sometimes Load times are (approx ~1 hr on a Dell T7400) ridiculous.

SolidWorks "It would so nice if you could put in the option of being able to create a regular drawing from a virtual part" This way big companies can save money. But also anyone who is designing a 400inch Tunnel Boring Machine can do it as an Assembly, not as a part1.sldprt.

Additional coments more than welcome.