SolidWorks Tech Tip: Thickness Analysis
If you are doing plastic part design, or castings, the material thickness throughout your part is an important design concern. SolidWorks Professional includes a Thickness Analysis tool so you can visualize the thicknesses of your part. To check a part’s thickness, go to Tools > Thickness Analysis… This will automatically turn on the SolidWorks Utilities [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Cut With Plane
You can use a Reference Plane to cut away a portion of a model. This is very useful for creating sections or cutaway configurations — for example for symmetric simplification prior to analysis — or to remove material to make a part flush with a datum. To cut with a Reference Plane, go to Insert [...]
DimXpert: Believe it or Not
Did you know that you can actually get the title block in your drawing to display “Unless Otherwise Specified” tolerances from your Part model? I was working with one of our CAPINC SolidWorks customers and found some really interesting things relating to this using DimXpert technology. For several years now, SolidWorks has offered DimXpert for [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
