Mates: The Wild Kingdom of SolidWorks
You don’t have to be Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom to appreciate the number of ways to pair parts together using “Mates” in SolidWorks. However, if we take a page or two from Darwin, we might make sense of the classifications of mates in SolidWorks. Let’s think of how Darwin classified the kingdom of plants [...]
Can my part be manufactured?
As a mechanical designer or engineer, have you ever wondered what it will take for the shop to manufacture youre design? I bet you may have had the machinist come over to your office and say, what are you crazy? We can;t make this make this part! The design stage is considered the most crucial [...]
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (or maybe just Planes…)
SolidWorks 2010 overhauled the Reference Planes tools so that they work like familiar and easy to use Mates. By implementing this new way of developing Reference Planes, it doubles the amount of planes that you can create in one step. Here’s how it works: Go to the Reference Plane tools in the drop down menu [...]
How do I render something 1:1 scale?
Photoworks (and the young up-and-comer, PhotoView 360) are great tools to make images for a marketing brochure, website, or just to show off your cool product. But what if you need an image rendered 1:1 scale at exactly a certain size, let’s say 8.5″ x 11″, for printing out? It’s not immediately obvious how to do this, [...]
Create an Alphabetical BOM in 3DVIA Composer
Have you ever wanted to create a Bill of Materials from your design in an alphabetical list, like when you buy a piece of furniture? You can do this with 3DVIA Composer. Simply use the BOM Workshop within 3DVIA Composer. The cool thing is that it creates BOM IDs from properties like actor name, actor [...]
Central MA and Northern CT SolidWorks Users Group on March 10th
The Central Massachusetts and Northern Connecticut SolidWorks Users Group (CMNC-SWUG) will be meeting tonight at Metso Automation at 44 Bowditch Drive, Shrewsbury MA, 01545. The festivities begin at 5:30pm with networking and refreshments. The presentations for tonight’s meeting will be delivered by Tom Cote, of Veeco Solar Equipment and Bruce Holway, of Dassault Systemes SolidWorks [...]
“Big” News for SolidWorks Users
In doing some investigation relating to the actual dimensional limits of SolidWorks CAD models I came to some compelling conclusions. Solidworks models are dimensional, (rather than unit-less) and the native modeling basis is 1 meter. The largest possible model dimension is 1000 meters, (39370.07874016 inches) and the smallest possible model dimension is 0.0000001 meters, (1/10th [...]
Design Cams in SolidWorks
Did you know that you can create cams with fully-defined motion paths and follower types with SolidWorks if you have the Toolbox Add-In turned on? You can choose circular or linear cams with many motion types. You can select the follower track as a blind cut or cut through the entire cam. To create a [...]
SolidWorks Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: Part II
Assembly Visualization provides different ways to display and sort an assembly’s components in a list and in the graphics area. You can sort the list by one property at a time. Basic calculated numerical data such as component mass, density, and volume are available in the tool. Additionally, you can create customized criteria which are [...]
Consumer Product Design with SolidWorks
Many times, an industrial product designer will sketch out the design either on paper or on software like Adobe Illustrator. These designs are very stylized and a lot of thought is put into these drawings. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use these designs more readily? SolidWorks has all the tools available for this [...]
