As Application Engineers we are constantly asked for “best practices” and usually it’s around the topic of SOLIDWORKS Assembly performance. Most of the time when people ask what they can do differently or are they following best practices, my answer is extremely robust….[Insert Shoulder Shrug]. Don’t get me wrong there are certainly some best practices that can be followed like don’t work with errors in the Design Tree or mating to common surfaces, but honestly a fair number of users […]
Continuing with my twisted pair theme from my last blog, Twisted Pair in Electrical 3D, let’s talk about how to document twisted pairs within a cable. When you add a cable to your cable library within SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic, that has twisted pairs, under the Cable cores section of the Cable reference properties, you will notice a Group icon. This icon is greyed out until you “Ctrl” select a pair of wires to group. So, you simple select all the […]
I had unknowingly struggled with this SOLIDWORKS command for several months. I use “unknowingly” here not because I wasn’t aware that I was struggling (I very much was) but because I wasn’t aware that this command was the cause. I write this article in hopes that there are others out there in my former position—knowing the what but not the why. Essentially, it seemed like SOLIDWORKS suddenly stopped letting me perform certain rotations. The model would get “stuck” in its […]
Oftentimes, when users work with assemblies, common geometry must be utilized for piecing components together. There are several shortcuts and tools available in the SOLIDWORKS software to make this mating process easier. But a shortcut I feel is underutilized is Multiple mate mode. Multiple mate mode is a shortcut located in the Mate PropertyManager. It is initiated by clicking the icon depicted below: In the following example, the assembly’s components have been added, but have yet to be mated together. […]
NOTE: This issue is fixed in 2021 SP 3.0, which is currently in early visibility on www.my.solidworks.com, however until the wide release is out, this is a fix. In SOLIDWORKS 2021, there is an issue with linked properties in Drawings notes causing SOLIDWORKS to crash to desktop: If you’re unfamiliar with the tool, it’s quite handy for automatically updating properties for different configurations so you don’t have to manually search out the values for certain properties (e.g. configuration name, mass, […]
Utilizing Design Tables is very handy and certainly saves time with designing as well as modifying. While using Design Tables to assist with the creation of multiple Configurations at the Part Level is common, what about at the Assembly Level? Currently, the same technique doesn’t apply but there is a way in which we can still accomplish this task. Here is a simple Assembly in which we intend for a Design Table to create a few additional Configurations. In each […]
SOLIDWORKS Electrical is a great tool for collaboration, standardizing schematic documentation, and saving time in project creation, but all these benefits rely on a developed environment and library. This puts increased value on ensuring our environment is secure and backed up should the worst happen. Not a problem. We can just back up the server applications folder and SQL database, right? Not quite. If a server were to go down, a simple restore of that server would not be sufficient […]
Generating reports and the automatic generation of tables is one of the more widely known uses of the information in SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic. I feel one of the most underused and most useful applications of the same schematic information is in a connection label. The ability to display information in any form desired is a powerful tool. A connection label is a representation of a device in terms of connections and various other pieces of information desired to be shown. […]
One topic that seems to frequently come up in SOLIDWORKS is the Drawing Template, the Sheet Format and how they work together to create a Drawing. This is an area of SOLIDWORKS functionality that causes a bit of confusion for newer, and experienced, SOLIDWORKS users. This held true recently while helping one of our customers who was trying to modify the Sheet Properties and select a new Sheet Format in an existing drawing. It was not the typical issue where […]
Today my challenge is to create a fixture to hold a part that has been machined using the lathe. It will be held in a tombstone mounting fixture for adding additional machined features. The tombstone feature needs to be able to hold 4 of the turned items. Here is the part that will be held in place. Here I have created the cavity for the fixture. When I look at this cavity in hidden lines visible style from the Top […]