Part IV: Creating and Using Libraries
The limitations of Smart Fasteners
Smart Fasteners have some documented limitations where you should not expect them to work:l (^) Holes in single parts
l Holes created by extruding a nested loop
l (^) A mirrored hole or cut features
l Holes in mirrored, imported, or derived parts
l (^) Misaligned holes
l Holes with a large difference in diameter
l (^) Holes with large gaps between them (a large gap in the axial direction)
l Holes made using different techniques (such as sketch pattern versus feature pattern)
If you would like to try out Smart Fasteners, then you can use the assembly included on the
CD-ROM called Chapter 17 Smart Fasteners.sldasm. In this assembly, half of the holes
are done correctly and the other half are not: the screws are put in either backward or headfirst.
The documented method for flipping the fasteners is to expand the Smart Fastener, right-click the
series, and choose Flip. In this case, my attempts resulted in success about half of time, which was
somewhat higher than my attempts with other assemblies. In some cases, screws were put in the
ends of shafts without holes, on filleted edges, and unfortunately missed most of the places that I
did want the screws to go.
Organizing Toolbox parts in an assembly
Assembly FeatureManagers are hard enough to manage when they become full of parts; they
become even more unmanageable when they also need to include the many types of fastener parts.
As a result, I recommend organizing fasteners, as well as any other type of part that is found in
large quantity in the assembly, into folders, as shown in Figure 17.20. You should also group parts
of the same size or function together.
Recommendations
After spending almost an entire chapter saying what you should not do, it is finally time to say what
you should do. Toolbox can be downright dangerous if you install and use it improperly; however,
the following recommendations work in most situations.
Just to be clear about this, the most serious file management problems with Toolbox show up
when you use configurations, which just happens to be the default option. Still, Iām a big fan of
using configurations in general, and especially with library parts, but a Toolbox implementation
with configurations is challenging. Again, this is because of the file management issue of different
users having the same part names with different content (Toolbox parts with or without certain
configurations created).