Do-it-yourself DWX Class

For me the best way to learn something new is to simply try it on a little non-production data set.

I’ve put together the simplest little play data set I could come up with -just one part and a drawing file…in less than five minutes you’ll have a very basic understanding of what ‘Xpress can do and you’ll have a set of files you can expand on to learn more.

(DriveWorksXpress can work with assemblies, but again, we are going to keep this example very simple, so I can keep you under the five minutes I promised you.)

Let’s imagine we sell tubing and have these design constraints:

• Stock OD’s can be sold from 3-6″ in 1/4″ increments
• If the OD is greater than 5″ the tube thickness needs to be 1/4″ else it should be 1/8″
• This tube is stocked at 6″ long, but can be cut down to any length the customer requests
• Your customers like to have their name on the drawing and in file name

Here is all you have to do to try it:

1. Download this file, and extract the three files into an empty directory
2. In SOLIDWORKS, Tools -> DriveWorksXpress (you may get a notification about a database not being found, this is normal (’cause you haven’t made one yet), click okay)
3. Choose “Create/Change Database” and click Next
4. Find the “tube.mbd” file and click “Open”
5. Click the “Run” tab in the top right side of the DriveWorksXpress dialog
6. Enter in your desired values and click next.
7. Done! You should now have two new files in your directory describing your new parts. You can now run the specification over and over.

That’s it. I’m done holding your hand. Play around see if you can reverse engineer it.