We all know that Bolted Connections are a powerful way of not only adding nuts, bolts, and washers to your assembly but also adding placed features (holes) down into the various parts of the assembly. This post assumes an understanding of Bolted Connections. A typical workflow might consist of having holes predefined in one part and using them to drive the location of the holes in the mating part(s).
After the Bolted Connection does it thing we have holes placed into the parts at the part level (for detailing purposes) and hardware placed and constrained into the assembly. All of this to ensure the holes are aligned in all parts and everything is constrained.
Now, have you ever had a customer or boss change their mind? So have I. Let's suppose that instead of 3 holes they are requesting 4 holes. This is no problem with Bolted Connections. We simply go back into the bracket part file and change the hole pattern from 3 to 4.
On the surface it appears that everything updated and is working as expected. Until we start digging deeper into the model tree. The red lightning bolt means that the Bolted Connection has not updated and the global update within the assembly environment does not do the job. if we haven't drilled down into the model tree this would have been a costly mistake if not caught.
The step that most forget (Hat tip to Jeremy from Warfordsburg, PA) is that they forget to tell the Design Accelerator how to calculate when change happens. By default it is set to "Manual Solve". Setting the option to "Automatic Solve" will force it to update every time there is a change.
Tip - you don’t need to select hardware if you want to just add holes!
Hope this finds you well and saves you some time and potential costly mistakes. Back to playing MindSweeper!
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