Learn how to bring a sub-assembly into a drawing and utilize it to create a bill of materials. This guide provides a detailed step-by-step approach on how to go about this process, from inserting the sub-assembly, creating a bill of materials, to correlating the materials with the assembly using balloons.
Key Insights:
- The sub-assembly is inserted into the drawing by going to insert, drawing view, model, browse, and then finding the specific sub-assembly to drop into the drawing.
- A bill of materials is created by highlighting the item view, switching to an isometric view, and increasing the scale to 1 to 30. This bill of materials is a table showing the items involved in an assembly and their quantities.
- To correlate the bill of materials to the assembly, balloons are used. These balloons can be automatically spaced and attached to every unique piece, representing the item number as it appears in the bill of materials.
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In this video we are going to bring a sub-assembly into our drawing and use that sub-assembly to create a bill of materials. First things first, let's start a new page and we'll name this page framing sub-assembly. Now we need to bring in that sub-assembly, we'll go to insert, drawing view, model, browse, find SA002 underscore frame, open it and drop it into your drawing.
Go ahead and hit escape so it doesn't create any projections. All right, highlight your view and let's switch to an isometric view and let's increase the scale to 1 to 30. All right, looks pretty good.
Go ahead and save your work. All right, next we're going to create a bill of materials and as you know a bill of materials is a type of table that shows you the items involved in an assembly as well as the quantities of each of those items. We'll go into the basic drawing tools tab, select bill of materials and it's going to ask us what view or sub-assembly do we want to create that bill of materials around.
Select this item here, make sure that top level only is checked under BOM type and then click the green check mark and then just set it here at the bottom right hand corner. All right, as you can see it's got a column for item numbers, it's got a column for part numbers which are each of the parts involved here, descriptions which we don't have currently for these parts and the quantity of each one involved. First, let's customize this table so it fits our needs.
I'd like to get rid of the description column so I'm going to right click on this C cell here, click delete and select column and also you may have noticed that there are nine items but really only eight unique pieces. That's because the ninth piece is the sketch reference part. You may remember that in a previous video we imported that as its own part into the sub-assembly to use it as a reference for patterning and mirror features and things like that but it doesn't actually apply when it comes to our bill of materials.
Let's go ahead and delete that row. I'll right click on that number 10, go to delete and click row. I can move the bill of materials around by grabbing this crisscross arrow set and just kind of set it right here.
Next, we need a way to correlate what's happening in this bill of materials to what's here in this assembly and we do that with balloons. In the basic drawing tool, we go up here to balloon and we can attach a balloon to every unique piece and watch it populate with the item number as it appears in the bill of materials. We could go about that way but there is a quicker way which I'll show you right now.
I'm going to highlight these balloons and delete each one. First, under basic drawing tools, if you don't already have this feature available, go to search commands and find auto space balloons. Click it and drag it into your command manager.
Select auto balloons and watch it populate your sub-assembly with balloons assigning every single one of your unique pieces its item number shown in the bill of materials. Click the green check mark to close it out. Conveniently, it created all the balloons at the same time for us but we do have to clean up the graphics a little bit.
Let's go side by side and do that now. These balloons live on an arrow which keeps them in alignment. We can move the balloon itself or the arrow.
If we move the arrow to another piece, it will change what that balloon shows. Simply move the arrow to another location on that same piece where it's easier to view what that balloon is referring to. This three is okay over here but I think it might be better pointing to the piece from this direction.
There we go. Let's do that. We can grab this entire arrow set and bring this down.
It's unclear what this six is referring to. Let's move it over to this piece here so it's a little more clear. Better yet, we can even move this six over to the side and connect it that way.
We'll move this five over here and connect it here. This seven really shouldn't belong here so let's move that over to this linear arrow and connect it to this piece here. Let's move this arrow up.
This one, let's connect it to the mirror of that same part. This two, let's move it over here and then connect it like that so it's a little more clear that it's referring to that angled piece. Eight looks pretty good so we'll leave that alone.
Go ahead and set this in a good space on your board and save your work. That's it. In the next video, we're going to bring in the unique parts that make up the sub-assembly and add dimensions to those parts.
