Drawing Numbering

[[Sa...]]

Inspection Xpert is another one SolidWorks Inspection is a good one great features

[[No...]]

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Don't take it personally, but do you really have time for such tedious work? 😮
Can I please have a job at your company? 🤣

No, really. Many years back we still performed our measurement tasks with pen and paper, but even then we always refused to stamp drawings manually. Instead we used a system of writing down the dimensions more or less in clockwise order for every view on the drawing, explaining the ones that were ambiguous (like "upper left", "lower right" etc.). I guess we could afford that because our drawings were never as complex as those of other companies and we had no external customers to satisfy, only internal dev. departments.
But for 17 years now even we use a CAQ system with semi-automatic numbering from 2D IGES drawings, and it would be absolutely impossible to go back to manual stamping, even if it happened in Excel.Otherwise we'd never be able to deal with the amount of measurements we have to execute nowadays.

[[Ge...]]

Don't worry, I won't take it personally 🙂

We also only have drawings with 30-40 features in the customer drawings for the most parts. (90%)
If we still have a drawing with more than 40 features, we will do the work to create this kind of numbering. (10%)

I'm afraid to ask for extra software. 🙂

Is it possible to do this with the CAD software that is used to create the drawing?
Are there no extensions for AutoCAD or CREO/ProE?

Best regards
Gerhard

[[No...]]

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You need to point out to the bean counters how much they'll save by buying the software, and how much your throughput will increase. But be warned: It will increase, so that'll become the normal state of things, then you'll be assigned more work until you can't cope anymore...you see where this leads you? 🤣

[[Ge...]]

I already understood the bean counter system. 🙂

That's why I prefer to stay with Excel, because anyone can use it... 🙂

[[Gr...]]

We use Discuss at our facility. It is very fast when auto ballooning. Some of our prints are 5 pages and end up with up to 300 balloons. Once the ballooned drawing is finished we can create a AS9102 report in seconds. Discus works pretty slick

[[Ke...]]

Our team also uses Inspection Xpert. Not sure of the cost so it's hard to gauge value but it was an awesome product and has improved quite a bit recently.

[[Me...]]

If ALL you want to do is bubble drawings then get something for free like Acrobat or Excel and spend the time up front tp set it up to do that. You'd be wasting your money on those other programs, IMO.

If you're wanting to bubble, track revs, autofill reports with CMM data, Create custom reports, etc then the programs mentioned may very well be worth the cost, depending on how much of the features you use. I've used most of them.

The biggest misnomer about these programs that they will try and sell you on is that it automatically and seamlessly exports your data from the CMM to the report. Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to map out all the characteristics in a way that they show up in the right spot on the report. If you make tons of the same thing it's worth the time up front to set it up. If you do a lot of prototypes, small orders, etc, not so much.