Part III: Working with Assemblies
assembly, and is a more complex model. The desire to show all of the individual links moving
through the path may override both the complexity of assembling it and the performance
considerations of exercising all of the mates.Although the BOM method of organizing assemblies sometimes leads to unnatural solutions, you
should not discard it altogether. If you can devise concessions in order to make the BOM work
automatically, then you should do this.Depicting an assembly process
Manufacturing and assembly processes need to be documented as well as individual part design.
You often need to create exploded-view assembly instructions for manufacturing or service
documentation at each step of a multi-step assembly process. Figure 12.9 shows a page of this type
of process documentation.FIGURE 12.9Assembly process documentation
This is certainly a task that is different from the initial design or modeling of the assembly, and it
may require an entirely separate assembly model. Generally, you can perform the different steps by
using a separate configuration for each process step, with exploded views for each configuration.