How to change part quantity in a Bill of Material without editing the Drawing BOM

During a support call, this question came up. The customer stated, "My assembly has a total of 75 wire ties. I only have 1 part file inserted in my assembly but I want to show 75 as a quantity in my Bill of Material. How can I do this?" 

There are 3 ways that I can think of off the top of my head. Pick and choose which one is the best solution for you unless you have one of your own:

One way is to edit the quantity cell for that part in the drawing Bill of Material and overwrite the value. Another solution would be to pattern the part 75 times and suppress the pattern in the Feature Manager Tree. This would also show 75 as a quantity for the wire ties.  A third way is to use the File > Properties portion of the part itself. 

In this illustration, I am using a part file called Basic. I opened up the File>Properties of this part. The following property window appears.   I added a Property Name called "Quantity". I also made the TYPE a Number.  Once the Property named "Quantity" was added, I was able to link that property to the BOM quantity box. I updated the "Value/Text Expression" box to show the desired quantity of 75. 

Once the property box is completed, click OK.

Next, I created a Bill of Material for my Basic part. The quantity entered as a property is now visible in the QTY column of the Bill of Material. Mission Accomplished!

 

I hope any of these 3 solutions is useful to you.  Feel free to share some of your own ideas!

 

Judy Marlo

Application Engineer

Computer Aided Technology Inc.

 

SolidWorks BOM Showing Incorrect Information

I recently had a technical support call from a customer who was trying to copy an existing project of assembly files and part files to make another project that was similar but different.  They had renamed the files with new part file and assembly file names, but the BOM information which was to show these new part names wasn't.  It was showing the old file names instead.  So after some head scratching, I checked to see if these files had configurations in them.  They in fact did and were set at the configuration property level to show a 'user specified name' instead of the file or configuration name.  This is why file name 102-12345 was showing as 102-xxxxx instead of the correct file name.  Once we set these configuration properties to show the file name, all was well.  So if you encounter this same behavior on your system, remember that the configurations each have their own properties and verify that they are listing what they should be listing in your BOM.

So hopefully if this issue ever comes up in your work flow, you will remember this simple tip.  Thank you.

Brian Reel
CATI