Modeling Assemblies In Context

[cwilliamrose]

I have had to deal with models started by other people a lot in my career and sometimes it's just best to start over. This is also true of my own models that have seen too much 'development' during the design process. What I often do is start a new assembly and insert the old model into that assembly with the origin in a good spot (often the origin of the original file is way off in space somewhere because it was done in the context of the original assembly). Once the old model is where I want it in terms of the origin and the orientation is set so the top of the part faces up and the front faces the way I want it to I create a brand new part file on top of the old one. Yes, I convert entities but I immediately remove the 'On Edge' relations and dimension the sketch as is best for that part. If I create planes they are defined within the new part file, not to anything in the old part file or the assembly.

Having two parts occupying the same space in an assembly takes some getting used to but making them different colors gives you a visual tool to highlight areas that are not the same from one part to the other. You can hide the old part when it's in the way and show it when you need to.

The above procedure does several things -- it gets rid of old feature history and it breaks all the old external references. I find the feature tree often shrinks to less than half the length of the one in the original file. I also find I can better capture design intent when I start over. There's very little designing being done at this point, you're just modelling in the most efficient way so each part is easy to understand and maintain. FWIW.....