I know I’ve alluded to the project I’m working on here and there, but I thought I’d talk a little more about it for a couple of reasons. One, I think it’s pretty damn cool. Two, though I need to be vague due to confidentiality, I thought some of you might think it’s pretty damn cool too.
At last count, the main assembly was at 2200 components. After some retraining of the other designers, and going back into models, the number of bodies has shrunk from ~7200 to ~3000. I should explain here that the group I’m working with are completely new to SolidWorks, except from one other person. My duties include training, managing the upper level assembly, managing PDMWorks, and finding the answers/work-arounds to the hurdles that we face almost daily. Thankfully, my days are far from mundane! (A special thanks to the guys at Quest Integration for putting up with me.)
Best guess is we’re about 30% done. When it is completed, I’m figuring somewhere in the neighborhood of 4500 to 5000 components covering an area in excess of 255,000 square feet. Just for kicks, I "weighed" the structure the other day. It was ~8880 tons (17,767,116 lbs) and took up 490,433,621 cu. in.
It’s been interesting co-mingling SolidWorks and Revit models, trying to get architectural annotations created in SolidWork and dealing with the old-school nay-sayers. The more I hear that we’re not going to be able to get in done, the more driven I am to prove them wrong. We did manage to exceed the capabilities of eDrawings, which is why I implemented PDMWorks. The project managers want to be able to mess around with the upper-level assembly and there’s no way I’m about to let all those hours of work go down the drain. I was actually surprised that eDrawings crapped out the way it did. It simply couldn’t handle the size of the assembly.
I’m really looking forward to getting the finalized equipment in and beginning the routing process. It’s the one area that I’m a bit worried about. I don’t know how SolidWorks is going to handle the amount of cables, pipes and HVAC we’ll need to do. Good thing I’ll be in Concord next week. I plan on bending an ear or two while I’m there…
Stay tuned, I’ll be updating more as I can. I’m hoping to get permission to post some non-identifying pictures in the near future.
