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, but [...]
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, [...]
10Mar10
“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 [...]
8Mar10
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
On Thursday, March 4th the Boston Area SolidWorks User Group will be meeting at American Science & Engineering Inc at 829 Middlesex Turnpike, Billerica, MA 01821. The agenda starts off at 5:30pm with networking with other SolidWorks users. Food and refreshments will be available. From 6:00-6:15pm Opening statement from BASWUG Committee and from [...]
One of our Application Engineers pointed put a often overlooked function in SolidWorks called “Derived Sketch”. This tool derives a sketch from another sketch that belongs to the same part, or derives a sketch from another sketch in the same assembly! When you derive a sketch from an existing sketch, you are assured [...]
This is the second blog post in my manufacturing series. This scenario of outputting parts to DXF format for laser, waterjet, punching and so on should be used for parts with sheet metal bends. When creating parts using the Sheet Metal functions, SolidWorks will calculate the flat pattern. New in SolidWorks 2010, [...]
In working with several customers and preparing for my webcast on SolidWorks for Aerospace Component Manufacturers (watch recording here), I realized how powerful the new DXF/DWG output capabilities in SolidWorks 2010 were. Simply put, a manufacturing engineer can output a DXF file from a SolidWorks model without the need to make a detail drawing. [...]
