Augi World - July/August 2008 - (Page 20) AUTODESK INVENTOR All about the BOM What is a Bill of Materials within the Autodesk Inventor® assembly model? Not the assembly drawing, but the assembly model. Yes, there is a bill of material (BOM) feature available within the assembly model. I haven’t found many references to this tool in the half-dozen Inventor books that sit on my desk. One of the advantages of being an Adjunct Professor at a local community college is that I get to review several books for the classes that I teach. Therefore, I normally have two or three books from each class that I review and keep for further reference as needed. Just because I teach doesn’t always mean I’m an expert, it means only that I’m willing to do my best to teach those who are willing to learn. Sometimes I have to do a little research. That is what I needed to do for this article—some extra research. What I discovered is that this Bill of Materials feature is an interesting tool that I may put to use in the future. Perhaps you will, too. First, what is a Bill of Material? A BOM, as it is called, is a listing of parts used in an assembly, whether the assembly is for a weldment or for an assembled group of parts/components. This could be a final assembly or a sub-assembly. In this article, I will cover much of what is in the BOM dialog box; however, there is more for you to discover as well. will be a “+” beside the part number icon. This will be under the Part Number Column. Under the BOM Structure you may see Normal, Inseparable, and Purchased. If you click on one of them, a fly out will open and you may select other options including Phantom and Reference. Reference may also be selected by right-clicking on the part number within the model bar and selecting the Bill of Material Structure option. Unit QTY default is “Each” as shown in Figure 2. Next to that is QTY, or how many times you place the part within your assembly. The Description column is taken from the part Description line in the iProperties/Properties option, Project tab. There are a couple other tabs and because we don’t use them, I delete them. To delete, just grab them with the mouse and drag off the heading bar and drop; they are gone. Yes, you can put them back and add others as well, like this: on the top toolbar there is an icon for Choose Headings. Open that and select any additional headings you may need. To see what parts are within a sub-assembly or weldment, click on the “+” and the list will expand; click on the “-” to collapse the part list. The Structured tab, which by default is Disabled, needs to be Enabled. To do that, right-click on the tab and select Enable. This will then open the tab, or display the data, and what you see is very similar to the Model Tab. One thing to notice is you cannot expand any of the sub-assemblies to see parts that make up the assembly. This is for top level w w w. A U G I . c o m Figure 1: Inventor Assembly Panel Assembly model BOM An obvious question arises: Why would I want a BOM in a model where I can’t attach the BOM to the model to print out? Can’t print—can only view and edit. To print, you will have to export the BOM to another format such as Excel. But then, why would you want to print it out from the model anyway? The BOM is there for a reference so that you can check your assembly—check the parts description and the properties. Let’s get started. There are a couple of ways to access the BOM feature. From the Panel BarAssembly Panel, choose the last icon in the list for Bills of Material. Figure 2: BOM dialog box (default) Click to open. The other way to access is from the Tools pull-down; click on the Bill of Material option. See Figure 1. Figure 2 shows the BOM dialog in default configuration. The three tabs As you can see in the BOM dialog box, there are three tabs: Model Data, Structured (Disabled), and Parts Only (Disabled). Model Data is just that—it lists all the parts and sub-assemblies with your assembly. If there are sub-assemblies, there 20 http://www.augi.com
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