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ironcad

Configuring new uses for already created designs

June 16, 2021 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Repurposing designs saves design time and money, helping you get to market faster.

By Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor

Sometimes you don’t need to re-invent the wheel. You could, for instance, drop the computer-aided design file for an existing wheel into your lawnmower design. Many companies, particularly those that create custom parts or manufacturing systems, integrate already-created CAD parts into an assembly to shave design time.

That’s the idea behind configuration-based design, which allows users to drop an already-created design file into a part or assembly for quick customization. With configuration-based design, the CAD file automatically sizes and fits itself into the assembly.

While today’s CAD systems continue to add that functionality, IronCAD was the originator of the concept with the company’s launch in 1998, says Cary O’Connor vice president of marketing at IronCAD, Atlanta.

With this method, feature, part, and assembly data for each part are stored in a catalog of frequently used parts and assemblies. The piece from the catalog provides precise reference locations when designers drop their components into a larger design, positioning it automatically into any complex orientation required, O’Connor says.

“In traditional CAD, you start with a sketch, put it into a 3D profile, you insert parts from a file system and you keep drawing like that,” he adds. “We can do that, but with us, you can also drag-and-drop parts and assemblies from a catalog into the design environment, mesh the geometry, and use that for enhanced CAD design.”

Engineers do, of course, need to create the original file for the frequently used parts and assemblies, which are then stored in the catalog, from which they can be pulled from for use again and again.

“But engineers can use these parts confidently without worrying about how the original design was created,” O’Connor says.

The catalog of parts requires only one file, no matter how complex. Assembly part data is integrated into a file’s design rather than linking to external files, O’Connor says.

The CAD maker calls these cataloged parts “intelligent parts” because they contain the geometry and other information to fit the assembly seamlessly. The designer need not worry about that step.

This is what allows the drop-in and automatic fit, he adds.

“Rather than insert constraints to the part, we’re doing it on the fly, positioning and changing information at the same time. If you want to make it larger, the tool knows how to update the part to make that change,” O’Connor says.

The already-designed parts can be dropped within many popular CAD programs as well as into IronCAD designs, he says.

Some companies have integrated IronCAD software with their enterprise systems for even greater hands-off customization. Others have used it as a backbone of their own proprietary software. Still others use IronCAD as their design system.

Automation for quick customization

Take the example of Dutch company Van Keulen Interieubouw, which makes fixtures and equipment for retail and office environments, including shelving units and cashier stations made from materials like wood and laminate.

Van Keulen Interieurbouw, which makes office fixtures and furniture, is able to customize designs and get them into production quickly by integrating its CAD tool with its ERP system. Credit: Van Keulen Interieurbouw

Customer needs vary according to the layout and the look they seek. The company can manufacture and customize almost any interior element to meet customer requirements. Van Keulen maintains manufacturing facilities for processing wood, metal, and plastic.

To stay ahead of competitors, the company delivers its products quickly after they receive an order, “Even going to the point to state if they need to deliver the next day, they will deliver the next day,” says Eddy Huis in’t Veld, the company’s software manager.

“To move from design to the finished products very fast, we have to be very flexible,” he says. “So, we have a high level of automation within our company.”

Using IronCAD, the company creates and stores the intelligent parts within its parts catalog. Some designs are reusable; others need quick modifications—easy to make on an already-created part where the CAD information also exists—and others need to be redesigned from scratch, Huis in’t Veld adds.

The parts can be added where needed to common CAD designs.

Engineers customize designs as they’re ordered, incorporating the pre-existing catalog of parts into their own design. The company has integrated the CAD application into its enterprise resource management system. When the engineer hits done, a parts request is automatically sent to the ERP system, which creates a list of needed parts for the manufacturing floor.

“ERP can extract the size, material technology, and many other aspects from the drawing,” Huis in’t Veld says. “It puts them into the production environment, sending them into the right machines in the right order.

“We can be in production within 15 minutes after the designer puts the drawing into the ERP system,” he adds. “Open your drawing, make the changes, and send it to ERP. With a few mouse clicks, we can start production again.”

In other words, designers can design a custom order and send it to the manufacturing floor within the same system.

“They’ve created a kind-of curated process-manufacturing system,” O’Connor says.

The design tool is also useful in the sales process, where salespeople can show potential customers how a potential shelving unit—for example—would look made from laminate, built to a certain size, and standing on particular types of legs. Suppose the customer seeks another shape for the legs, or would like a different style of shelving unit. In that case, a salesperson can make those changes quickly with IronCAD and present them immediately.

On the plant floor and in the race car

The drag-and-drop capability to customize parts and assemblies doesn’t stop with CAD itself. Software makers take IronCAD’s core functionality and build their own product around it. One example is Fixture Builder, a 3-D design and modeling product from Renishaw, a supplier of coordinate measuring machines and machine tools.

The software is used to create and document fixturing set-ups.

Fixture Builder’s fixtures have intelligence built-in because they’re made with and stored within the IronCAD’s design and catalog application.

Renishaw Fixture Builder includes configuration management functions to create and document fixturing set-ups in a number of ways. Credit: Renishaw

“A designer would import the catalog model they want to build fixture around, drop the plate and components into their piece, and then the export file to show how someone in the real world would set up that fixture,” O’Connor says.

And of course, IronCAD is useful as a company’s primary modeling tool.

When mechanical engineer Andy Robinson opened his own business, he turned his love of drag-car racing, designing and building racecar chassis. And, while racecar drivers won’t be thinking of the software behind the design of their chassis, they’ll certainly appreciate its ability to hold its own in a roll.

While Robinson had long worked with CAD in previous roles, he knew for Robinson Race Cars, in Hampshire, England, he’d need a tool anyone on his team could use.

More importantly, he wanted an environment where they could manipulate, change, and alter designs in 3D easily and on the fly, Robinson says.

Soon, he knew that with the help of CAD technology his company could resupply car parts and design and build chassis.

For instance, CAD enabled Robinson’s team to take a single repair and develop a standard part, which he could stock and sell to all in the industry.

Today, many of the former touring cars featured in the British Touring Car Championship are now in the hands of private clubman racers and, as Robinson knew, those cars still got bent and broken most weekends. The owners—who couldn’t, of course, buy many vital parts off the shelf—had a hard time keeping their cars running.

The Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship is a touring car racing series held each year in the United Kingdom. Touring cars are particularly suited to racing long distances.

Recently, one such racer came to Robinson Race Cars with a broken suspension upright from a Spanish SEAT touring racecar that needed repair. A common problem and one that possibly dozens of drivers were dealing with across Europe.

Robinson Race Cars created parts and chassis for a 1955 Chevrolet owned by Matt Woods. Credit: Matt Woods

Using IronCAD, Andy was able to reverse engineer the part and create a 3D model for evaluation. He could then understand the structure of the upright and look for weaknesses in the original design. He then went to several machine shops for proposals.

Having created the part, Andy was then able to show it on his website and approach other SEAT race teams to offer them replacement uprights.

Robinson Race Cars began by designing chassis for touring and other racecars and soon moved on to providing custom parts for many of those cars.

His love of drag racing got him into this business, and Robinson hopes he can turn his attention to supplying those parts as well. That’s certainly feasible. In 2010, many European countries began to wake up to the sport of drag racing, as abandoned airfields across Poland, Croatia, and Russian were converted into quarter-mile drag strips.

From its early days in the 1990s, configuration-based design has become a stalwart of the design process. While more and more CAD systems today include at least parts of the method, IronCAD first introduced the functionality with its release in 1998.

And users like Van Keulen and Renishaw continue to find new ways to put it to work for them.

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Filed Under: ironcad Tagged With: IronCAD

IronCAD unveils product update for IRONCAD 2021

April 20, 2021 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD announced the release of the first update for IronCAD’s newest 2021 edition. The IRONCAD 2021 Product Update #1 (PU1) features enhancements and capabilities that enable IronCAD users to accelerate productivity in the design process in both 3D and 2D.

Created with a focus on design productivity and usability, IronCAD 2021 PU1 has improvements in many key functional items. CAD software users will benefit in areas including Sheet Metal, Point Cloud Modelling, IronCAD Detail Drawing, and General 3D Modeling with IronCAD’s drag & drop push-pull capabilities and patented TriBall positioning and creation tool.

Among the many new enhancements, key functional items addressed for IronCAD 2021 Product Update #1 are:

Sheet Metal Enhancements: These enhancements support more capabilities in sheet metal design and even design in Corrugate Packaging by supporting single line Cut and Cross-Break Design with the Sketch Bend tool. Users can create complex combinations of bends, line cuts and cross-breaks in a single tool simplifying the process and steps required to create their products.

Point Cloud Enhancements: Improvements in the Point Cloud capabilities have been added to allow users to work more effectively with scanned data. Import multiple scanned data sets into a single working environment. Position imported data sets to the correct locations. Reduce data sets on import to control the amount of data required. Use new tools to deleted points and to hide/show point clouds to enhance the workflow when working and creating geometry from the point cloud data.

IronCAD Drawing Enhancements: Many usability improvements have been added in the detail drawing environment including the Double-Click to Quickly Edit Properties for More Annotations which speeds up the annotation process. Another key improvement is the Bill of Material improvement for Top-Level Assemblies to Expand on View Based Selections allowing for more control to create specific tables and callouts for products.

Further improvements within Product Update #1 also address enhancements to general items including, Pin Favorite Stocks in the Pop-up Stock Table on Drop from the Catalog, Project Edges from Import 2D Reference Curves in 3D Into Other Sketches, Improve/Support Larger Preview Images in Windows Explorer for IronCAD Files, Add New Option in the Right-Click Menu of the TriBall to Turn off the TriBall for quick access, as well as improvements to IronCAD’s KeyShot Integration and support for Rhino 5.0.

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Filed Under: ironcad Tagged With: IronCAD

Latest release of IronCAD helps move 3D designs to production faster

November 30, 2020 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, a 3D CAD productivity platform for metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers, announces the release of IRONCAD 2021, which contains many exciting improvements and capabilities that help customers drive innovation and move to production faster.

Every year, IronCAD global customers submit feedback with enhancement improvements that matter the most for increasing the design productivity or improving the 3D to the production drawing process. In addition to user feedback, after having endured an unprecedented year, it was essential to keep IronCAD users working and ensure that productivity is the way of life for their business with the release of IRONCAD 2021. In this year’s release, the main focus was on improving productivity to help create designs and production drawings faster. With this in mind, the goal for IronCAD 2021 was to improve the performance from 3D to the 2D detailing stage, improve the detailing user experience, continuous quality improvement, as well as improvements that make the design process more productive.

Examples of the new improvements in IRONCAD 2021 are:

Improved IntelliShape Handles for Increasing Performance – New behaviors to quickly symmetrically size shapes with a right-click drag, quick access to handle values attached to the cursor, and more powerful snap options to get precise locations from a point or center point that allow users to design faster with IronCAD shapes.

User Interface Improvements to Enhance the User Experience – Easier access to multiple catalogs, direct feedback on face and edge length/area information, direct selection access to assemblies, parts, features, and faces in the current selection viewing direction, TriBall® shortcuts to reduce steps in repeating copy/link commands, and many more to improve the user workflow in design.

Sheet Metal Design Improvements and Accessibility – Improved processes in selecting stocks, automatic bend alignment on angled sheet metal stock for creation and updates, and accessing common commands for sheet metal bends to speed up the design and editing of sheet metal.

Overall 2D Technical Drawing User Improvements – 2D Annotation catalog for common annotations, 2D Template catalog to quickly change templates for drawings, new tools for revision clouds and ISO Tolerance Codes for dimensions, improved bulk view creation options to automatically generate drawing layouts that speed up the 2D detailing, and many other improvements to enhance the detailing process for production designs.

Communication Improvements for Sharing – The free Share 3D viewer has an improved user interface and support for measure and textures while supporting large geometry data sets that allow users to communicate 3D designs faster and easily with customers on any tablet or laptop device on any platform with an HTML5 supported browser.

“In a year with major uncertainty and with businesses and people across the globe impacted in unique ways, IronCAD worked closely with our customers to shape the 2021 release to meet their current needs and to help plan for future capabilities for remote working and collaboration,” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing for IronCAD. “IronCAD remains committed to focus on our customer satisfaction and to deliver solution to assist our customers in remaining competitive and innovative in these challenging times. IronCAD 2021 is our first stepping stone in this direction and more solutions are being developed with our teams to deliver innovative solutions to our customers.” he continued.

Try the newest, updated version of IronCAD now for free by navigating to https://www.ironcad.com/free-online-trial/ to start your free online trial.

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Filed Under: ironcad Tagged With: IronCAD

Multiphysics for IronCAD 2020 released

January 10, 2020 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, a leading provider of design productivity solutions, announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its fully integrated Multiphysics for IronCAD (MPIC).

Since the unveiling of Multiphysics for IronCAD, the usability and robustness of MPIC have been appreciated by many IronCAD users. Each year, additional improvements and refinement have been added to further increase the ease of use as well as the functionalities that sets it apart from the competition. Most of these new features are based on user feedback and requests to speed up the design cycle, simplify analysis setup, and reduce analysis times.

MPIC 2020, includes several new and improved key technologies designed specifically for CAD design analysis. IronCAD’s focus was on general CAD designers and users who want to adopt design analysis earlier in the digital prototyping cycle and aim to provide accurate, realistic and quick analysis. As such, most of these improvements are in the assembly analysis functionalities.

Some of MPIC 2020 new technologies and features include:

• New tolerance assembly analysis technology is implemented with respect to how parts are assembled and meshed for analysis. This new option uses parts’ discrete boundary surface facets to smartly unite parts together for design analysis. This technology enables the healing of CAD assembly models with intentional or unintentional gaps so they can be glued together for quick design analysis.

• New drag-and-drop user interface has been implemented in the part tree of materials, boundary condition constraints, and load areas. Users can select the part’s tree node and drag it to a different material tree to quickly assign it to a different material. In boundary condition constraints and loading, the sequence of the priority of the constraint can also be changed by selecting the condition and drag it up/down to change the priority of the boundary condition.

• MPIC model is now upgraded to XMD 2.2 model and compatible with all AMPS product lines. It can be opened, modified, and analyzed by any AMPS XMD application if additional features/capabilities are needed.

Multiphysics for IronCAD offers basic to advance versions that include non-linear, fluid, dynamics, and rigid body kinematics. Once installed, users have access to the full functionality limited to 2000 mesh nodes that can be used to get started with the analysis application. You can access the latest Multiphysics for IronCAD 2020.

“This new release with new tolerance assembly analysis technology will streamline the design analysis for design engineering beyond anything in the market today” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing of IronCAD. “Users will be able to quickly design products and assemblies with accurate design simulation easily without having to struggle with gaps and inaccuracies often found in CAD designs that don’t fully model manufacturing processes such as welds and fixturing. Overall, users can improve designs and design-to-product times with this new functionality” he continued.

Dr. Ted Lin of AMPS Technologies, developers of MPIC, and meshing technology partner Dr. Mark Beall, President of Simmetrix Inc. says, “For more than three years of development and testing, our team has taken on this task to resolve this well-known problem in CAD models. This new technology gives the user more control over gluing together parts in assembly models with intentional or unintentional gaps for quick design analysis that virtually eliminates the CAD modeling inaccuracy issues that users struggled to resolve in the past.”

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Filed Under: ironcad Tagged With: IronCAD

IronCAD launches Design Collaboration Suite 2020

December 4, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, the 3D CAD platform of choice among metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers, unveiled IRONCAD 2020 and it’s got more than just perfect vision for design productivity. Designed to increase productivity for CAD software users to get their products to market faster, this release focuses on performance, commonly asked usability items, and continued improvements on key functionality that sets IronCAD apart in the design process.

Every year, IronCAD users submit feedback with enhancement requests that matter the most for increasing the design productivity or improving the 3D to production drawing process. The IRONCAD 2020 release delivers improved large assembly performance, streamlined workflows, and new capabilities that help users design, present, and communicate their ideas faster and easier. This year’s release, the main focus was on improving the ICD (IronCAD Drawing Environment) to increase productivity. With this in mind, our goal was to improve the 3D to 2D detailing process to reduce the design to manufacturing timing with better performance, improved commands, better accessibility to common commands, faster drawing creation with our automated bulk view creation tool that enable users to go from concept to manufactured products faster.

Beyond the IronCAD Drawing Environment, IronCAD delivered performance improvements for working with large assemblies. This significant development was implemented to increase the system’s performance and to take advantage of newer hardware with multiple cores. In addition, many functional items were added to streamline the interaction with large assemblies, such as additional improvements in our Shrink Wrap commands for condensing large assemblies into workable reference geometry. With IronCAD 2020, noticeable improvements can be found importing, opening, saving, and working daily with large assembly files.

Examples amongst the new improvements in IRONCAD 2020 are:

· Large Assembly Performance – Open/Save/Import speed is improved for files that contain large structures that may have large assembly trees containing many nodes under individual assembly levels. Changes implemented have significant improvements in speed in all areas while working on large assemblies that range from 30-50% improvement.

· Real-time Interchanging of Full and Lightweight Models – Using IronCAD’s Shrink Wrap capabilities to create lightweight versions of parts and assemblies, you can dynamically interchange the fully detailed model and the lightweight model within an assembly file. This capability significantly improves the interaction with large assemblies not only on load/save but while design within the context of the full assembly.

· Many Technical Drawing/Detailing Improvements – IronCAD 2020 focused heavily on improving the speed from taking 3D Designs into production drawings ready for manufacturing. Speed improvements in creating and editing dimensions with quick access to dimension properties, Automatic Break Line support, Overall View Dimensions, 2D Catalogs support for reusable Annotations, and Spell Checker are among some of the many improvements added to improve the process.

· Commonly Requested Functionality – Focus was given to provide functionality commonly requested by our industry users. Command Search, Dockable Catalogs, 4K Support, Feature Fill Pattern, Sheet Metal Conversion and Layflat Design feature are among items added to enhance the design experience with IronCAD.

“Expanding on our recent 20th year release capabilities, IronCAD 2020 gains a significant leap in the ability to work and manage large assembly files commonly used among our custom machinery manufacturers” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing of IronCAD. “Users will feel improvements to the performance while working in 3D all the way through to the final production drawing output with the many improvements developed in the IronCAD Drawing Environment to speed up and aid the detailing process” he continued.

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Filed Under: ironcad, News Tagged With: IronCAD

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