“Plotting” revenge with SolidWorks Motion Simulation
How do we find out how fast an “object” is traveling so as to inflict the most damage on your enemy using a trebuchet? We would need to create a plot of how fast that “object” is traveling when it reaches its intended victim. Well, to answer that question, we can use SolidWorks Motion Simulation. [...]
Vortex Street on SolidWorks Flow Simulation
Recently I was asked a question regarding how to get SolidWorks Flow Simulation to display an animation of a flow over two cylinders. The flow would produce a vortex after the second cylinder that would peel off at certain rates of speed as the simulation ran over time (Sometimes called Vortex Streets). To set this [...]
InspectionXpert for SolidWorks 2011
For SolidWorks 2011, InspectionXpert has completely revamped the way quality departments can ensure proper inspection report documentation. In case you have not seen it, InspectionXpert for SolidWorks is a SolidWorks Partner Product add-in that automates the ballooning of SolidWorks drawings and creation of Inspection Sheets for quality control inspections. InspectionXpert eliminates the manual creation of [...]
Convert your files to SolidWorks 2011 format
When you are ready to upgrade SolidWorks and Enterprise PDM 2011, the number one thing that comes to mind for most users is that when SolidWorks 2010 and prior version files are opened in SolidWorks 2011, SolidWorks and Enterprise PDM think that some change has occurred to the file. This is indeed the case, as SolidWorks 2011 has [...]
Exchanging Pro/ENGINEER Data with SolidWorks
Why can’t we all just get along? Trading files back and forth is an issue that plagues engineers often. However there are some things that can alleviate the problem. Take exchanging Pro/ENGINEER parts and assemblies with SolidWorks. This works relatively well with the robust feature sets that SolidWorks offers for either handling the Pro/ENGINEER features natively as [...]
Windows Explorer and SolidWorks Enterprise PDM: Cage Match
Brace yourselves for a battle of epic proportions. We have two Heavyweight contenders ready to duke it out; SolidWorks Enterprise PDM and Microsoft Windows Explorer. The match rules are simple: Manage a new project, which undergoes design changes and ensure a secure and auditable environment for keeping track of revisions. As a bonus, the contenders [...]
Virtual Components in the land of PDM
In the land of SolidWorks Assemblies exists a funny creature called the “Virtual Component”. Virtual components are typically used in top-down design when you need to create a new part in the context of an existing assembly. During the conceptual design process, when you frequently experiment with and make changes to the assembly structure and components, [...]
The “Wild Kingdom” of mates in SolidWorks Part II
What’s the fastest way to show mates between two components in SolidWorks? This was a question posed to the tech team here at CAPINC at our internal Beat the Geek challenge last week. Let’s uncover some of the possible solutions: One method is to use the Show Mates function that is part of context menu [...]
“ALT” Reality Part II
Which key do you hold down to “shift” drawing views around on the sheet without having to click exactly on the bounding box of the view or on the edge of a part or assembly in that view? Once, again the “ALT” key comes to the rescue. Simply hold the “ALT” key down then left [...]
Furniture Design with SolidWorks
SolidWorks has an array of tools for furniture and cabinet design. With SolidWorks “Weldments”, stock wood sizes for creating frame based geometry can be accomplished quickly, with accurate cut lists. Part Library Features for wood joining methods and Smart components for assembling systems with mechanical fasteners make assembling and specifiying a complete job easy. I [...]
