Inventor/Mechanical dwg files going large

[brradako]

Dear community,

Recently I imported one dwg file i.e. project from Inventor 2009 to Mechanical 2009
File is quite huge 25Mb and I cannot zip it. If I try to zip, it will compress only half of megabyte. I don't use xrefs nor I can use WBLOCK in Mechanical, since only available view is Layout .
I also tried PURGE and FILTERS ( to remove layer filters ) but it doesn't have any effect on file size .
Inventor behaves oddly too. Even when I erase all objects , empty file is still too huge.
For instance, every time I add a line , delete the same line and save project, the file will become bigger. File grows regardless that I erased line.

Could someone help me?

Best regards,
Nikola

[BeKirra]

Dear community,

Recently I imported one dwg file i.e. project from Inventor 2009 to Mechanical 2009
File is quite huge 25Mb and I cannot zip it. If I try to zip, it will compress only half of megabyte. I don't use xrefs nor I can use WBLOCK in Mechanical, since only available view is Layout .
I also tried PURGE and FILTERS ( to remove layer filters ) but it doesn't have any effect on file size .
Inventor behaves oddly too. Even when I erase all objects , empty file is still too huge.
For instance, every time I add a line , delete the same line and save project, the file will become bigger. File grows regardless that I erased line.

Could someone help me?

Best regards,
Nikola

Hi Nikola,
I'd like to quickly give some comments before the giants in this forum turning up.

The good thing is:
You are not along.
The bad thing is:
This is the one of the disadvantages from Inventor.
You'll find that the inventor files are like hundreds of the children of kindy crossing the road when you are sending the drawings to someone else, especially for the GA drawings.
On the other side, you normally have a single file for an assembly object & it will be a lot smaller in file size if you do your project in AutoCAD.

[Comach]

Hi Nikola,

25mb is actually quite a large dwg file even for Inventor, without seeing the drawing in question or some idea of content it is hard to provide specific advice.

There is a function called Shrink Wrap which may help to reduce complexity of the model in Inventor and by definition reduce complexity of the eventual drawing file.

Other ideas may be to consider what type of modelling you are doing...if for manufacture then you have limited options, if however you are doing plant layouts for example; using vendor data; then modelling judiciously (ie minimum detail) is recommended. What I mean by the latter is that I have seen many examples where people recreate vendor components in Inventor, modelling every detailed aspect of the item when in fact all that is required is a representation of the item, albeit dimensionally correct.

Consider breaking large assemblies down into modular blocks of sub assemblies and rebuild the final assembly in Mechanical 2009. The advantage here is that if you have a rogue file that is excessive then it is easier to track down the specific aspect of the model that is problematic.