SolidWorks Tech Tip: Why would I master model?
So I was at the Boston Area SolidWorks User group about three months ago, listening to a free technical presentation while eating free food and drinking free cold soda with my co-workers. (Yes, I’m trying to sell you on the idea of going to your local SWUG. It’s fun, you’ll make friends and you’ll learn [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: A Little ‘Added’ Performance
One tip to get a little extra performance out of your SolidWorks system is to turn off your Add-ins. For those that don’t know, Add-ins are software extras bundled with different packages of SolidWorks or supplied by third-party Gold Partners. They let us pull parts from a huge pre-defined library of bolts, screws, washers and [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: How Smooth is Smooth?
One of the hard things about designing in SolidWorks is getting a feel for how your part feels. 3D printers help with this somewhat, giving you touchable prototypes in a few hours, but for really smooth consumer products that have to feel perfect in your grip and reflect the light just so, there’s a quick [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: The best font for CAM (Part 1)
This week’s blog post comes from another question we got many times at the Eastec Tradeshow, and have gotten from every one of our customers who deals with granite: “What is the best font in SolidWorks for CAM engraving?” Now, most of them aren’t really asking for a ‘best’ font, they’re asking for a super [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Coating/Plating Parts
This weeks tech tip question was submitted by Patrick Scheffer, Sr. Mech. Engineer, Xenon Corporation: Patrick asked, “Is it possible in SolidWorks to apply a coating/plating to parts? For example if I have a copper housing with nickel plating, can I specify how thick and what material the coating is? I’m mainly interested in providing [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: How to change paragraph line spacing
I just had a case that taught me something about a box I always ignored in SolidWorks. To change “Paragraph” line spacing (term used by Microsoft products) to a note: 1. Select the note 2. Uncheck the “Use Document Font” check box and hit the “Font” button. 3. In the “Choose Font” window change the [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Watermarks
Watermarks, Watermarks, Everywhere… This week’s tech tip comes from a recent hotline call taken by engineer Al Zullo. A customer asked him: “Can you add watermarks to SolidWorks drawings?” Usually, the SolidWorks Knowledge Base is a pretty good resource for questions like this (and one any subscription customer can access, if you’d like an answer [...]
SolidWorks Flow Simulation Tech Tip: Bulk-Average Temperature
In SolidWorks Flow Simulation, what does “Bulk-Average Temperature” refer to? What’s the different between “Bulk-Average” and “Average”? The Bulk-Average temperature at any given point on a face is dependent on a few things, amongst which are the temperature of the fluid contacting that face, and the flow-rate of the fluid contacting that face. As an [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Renaming Imported Assemblies
Have you ever downloaded a really cool assembly from a free site like 3DContentCentral.com or grabcad.com, only to have it open in SolidWorks with a silly naming convention like “Imported-1.sldprt”, “Imported-2.sldprt”, for a hundred part files? This type of auto-naming can happen when SolidWorks is importing a file from one of the common neutral formats [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Put down that line!
You’ve just clicked to end your sketch line. You want to draw another line in SolidWorks that’s not connected to that one- do you have to escape out of your line tool only to pick it up again? No, just double click! Double-clicking while you have the line tool on ends your current line segment, [...]
