Necessity is the mother of invention so they developed a simple means to deal with mirrored parts. In the aircraft industry mirrored parts are quite common and often pretty involved so making a mirrored detailed drawing would have been a pain. PDM only controls revisions of the part file.ДЄ mirrored part is something different and you really have take into consideration its use. Keep in mind that configurations are not separately controlled with PDM. However, there are good reasons for exceptions to this for configurations. Configurations are also wonderful for development and should be separated into separate parts when going to production. For instance, in-context relationships to other parts or assembly states is great for developing the design, but they should, in my opinion, be broken and replaced with a part that is completely defined by its own dimensions and constraints when moving that part into production. Some of the things you can do in development should NOT be kept when you move into production. Our sw people believe that it is just ok to throw parts on paper & presto - dimensions no matter what they are are ok to send out - solidworks is god here - do not think just make a drawing & get it done - i had to send back one part 6 times this week alone to this person to correct - this just opens up another can of worms as to why no one is able to read & make drawings anymore - i began my engineering carreer as a draftsman back in the 70's so now i get alot of flack from the younger guys when i check drawings - this department needs some help but i am just one person & an old guy at that - thank you again for letting me rant - a great weekend to all RE: mirrored parts not acceptable Hands off person to deal w/ - he likes to run his police state rather then explain his reasons - i will take to heart what others have said here about mirroring parts - this is not the only issue he had w/ our parts - there was a list of things - all this arose from my making parts & giving them to be detailed to an inexperienced sw drafter.

Hello again & thank you for the replies - our sw policeman is a very RE: mirrored parts not acceptable ShaggyPE (Mechanical) 17 Feb 12 11:50 The sketches stayed in their original / unmirrored position and form. My recollection is that it was not perfect. There is an option for creating an independent part during the mirror command. I do not think featureworks can recreate this knowledge from a dumb solid. The way that a model is created can embed knowledge about how the features should move relative to each other for example: this hole is centered in this slot, these holes are all the same size and move as a group. A model that possesses design intent is much easier to modify and dimension than one that does not. There is more to creating quality SW models than simply having the correct final geometry. The bigger issue that I have with the technique is that it destroys design intent. If the company needs to maintain strict revision control, the use of these techniques can be problematic.ДЄs far as your trick for separating mirrored parts.Д¬urrently SW uses Parasolid in its modeling kernel so it is apt to work better than step when creating a dumb solid from a mirrored part.

If the company's business is such that the life of the models is short and tracking revisions is not typically done these techniques work great. This possibility rightfully makes anyone responsible for ensuring the integrity of the design and revision process uneasy. If the models are used in multiple products, or revisions to parts are made by other people, or by you a year later, parts other than the ones that are intend to change can be changed. They speed design and can speed modification during design, but they create dependencies that can produce surprising (unintended) results. Mirrored parts, configurations, in-context references and equations share a set of tradeoffs.

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