Time to FLEX Your SOLIDWORKS Modeling Skills I wanted to take the time to introduce to you a rarely used but incredibly powerful weapon in the SOLIDWORKS arsenal. With the FLEX feature at your disposal you will be able to transform your solids into fantastic shapes, only limited by your imagination. I will walk through the basics of the FLEX command and show you how it will deform even complex solids in an intuitive manner. There are four types of flexes: Bending Twisting Tapering Stretching I will demonstrate each of these types and the result will be a solid that would challenge any experienced SOLIDWORKS modeler. I will begin with
CATI Tech Notes
SOLIDWORKS Tips and Tricks and Info on Professional 3D Printing with Stratasys from the Technical staff of CATI
SOLIDWORKS: Do you WRAP? Not like JAY-Z or Lil Wayne
Do you WRAP? Not like JAY-Z or Lil Wayne The Wrap feature in SOLIDWORKS is great if you are trying to project a sketch without any distortion around a surface and cut or add material to that part. It supports any face which is planar, cylindrical, conical, extruded, or revolved. Let’s go thru the step to create a Wrap feature. First, let’s create a new sketch and add some text. You cannot create a Wrap feature from an open contour sketch. You must create using closed contour only. When creating the Sketch Text, you have some options. You can select an edge, curve, sketch or a sketch segment as reference
SOLIDWORKS: Assemblies Slow to Open – Searching for References
Assemblies Slow to Open – Searching for References There are a few reasons why your SOLIDWORKS assembly file might take longer to open than you expect. It could be due to hardware, file management, or even some system option settings. One easy thing to check is the file reference setting in the SOLIDWORKS system options. When SOLIDWORKS is opening an assembly file, there is a very specific order that the software is following as it searches for all of the referenced part and sub assembly files. This search order is: RAM referenced document paths last path used last path used by the system last path when the
SOLIDWORKS: Creating Links in Composer
Creating Links in SOLIDWORKS Composer SOLIDWORKS Composer is a great tool to generate technical deliverables from your SOLIDWORKS files. Users are aware of the standard capabilities of exploding assemblies, adding the necessary annotations and creating the views. I want to talk about some lesser utilized functionality, which is the ability to create links within your SOLIDWORKS Composer document. These links are properties like everything else in SOLIDWORKS Composer and can be applied to several types of collaborative and all geometry actors. These links can be hyperlinks to a specific web site, links to launch a program or links to other views in the SOLIDWORKS Composer document for an
Stratasys 3D Printing: Splitting Large Parts to Print in Multiple Pieces
Splitting Large Parts to Print in Multiple Pieces Bigger might be better, but it might not be necessary. When searching for the right 3D Printer, you should always to try to find a machine that can fit no less than 75 % or 80% of your parts. But it doesn’t have to fit every single one. Don’t sacrifice quality, price, or capability for a large unnecessary build volume. Printing parts in two or more sections is much easier than you’d expect. Here is a quick tutorial on how you can best split your large parts into printable sizes: Using Stratasys software, Insight, you can split an
Posted in Digital Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping
Stratasys 3D Printing: Customized Aircraft Interiors Take Off at Paris Air Show With Rapid Prototyping
Customized Aircraft Interiors – Rapid Prototyping In the video below, Jeremy Hui, our Senior Applications Engineer for the RP Solutions Business Unit, walks us through some of the great 3D printed rapid prototyping examples in action at the Stratasys booth at this year’s Paris Air Show. Utilizing the full color, multi-material capabilities of the J750 3D Printer and the tough, functional FDM materials of the Fortus Production Series, aerospace designers and engineers can really explore the horizons in custom interior design and engineering. In these examples, 3D printing is used to rapidly iterate through design concepts and then accurately simulate the final aesthetic characteristics of
Posted in Uncategorized
SOLIDWORKS: Cosmetic Threads
Cosmetic Threads Cosmetic threads can be a useful annotation to help manufacture parts. As a best practice, I always recommend using the Hole Wizard to create cosmetic threads it creates the correct hole size and adds the thread size automatically. All the geometric data that is required to create the desired hole is in a database that the Hole Wizard references. To access this data the only thing that is necessary is to select the standard (ISO, ANSI, etc) and the bolt or screw size. Depending on the hole type (counterbore, counter sink, clearance hole, tapped hole, etc) the correct values are referenced and used to create the hole
SOLIDWORKS: MBD Template Editor – Adding Custom Properties
MBD Template Editor – Adding Custom Properties So you’ve added Custom Properties to your Part or Assembly in SOLIDWORKS and now you want to bring those Custom Properties into your MBD Templates for creating 3D PDFs. Tech Tip: If you need help setting up Custom Properties in your Part or Assembly in SOLIDWORKS see our tech blog on Adding Custom Properties here. Shown below is a snapshot of the Custom Properties set up in this part. The Custom Property I am going to bring into my 3D PDF Template is CompanyName. First, we’re going to need to launch the Template Editor. The Command to access the 3D
SOLIDWORKS: 2017 – What’s New in Composer SP3.0 #SW2017
What’s New in Composer SP3.0 In the last few months the SOLIDWORKS team has appointed a new product manager for Composer and assigned members of the development team. They are actively adding more customer enhancements with service packs. SP 3.0 is the first to receive some new features. Here is a list of some of the things they added: BOM import from SOLIDWORKS Appearance Import Profile sort by Alphabetical or category Player Pro samples with a player pro license Digger control for player viewing Appearances With SOLIDWORKS Composer 2017 up to SP2.0, when you import a SOLIDWORKS assembly, you would only get the color but not the
SOLIDWORKS: Crashes – Windows 7 Users MicrOSOFT KB3186497
SOLIDWORKS Crashes In Mid-June we started to see multiple SOLIDWORKS crashes on machines with Windows 7 that updated Microsoft Security Patch KB3186497 – Offline Installer .NET 4.7, we have tested SOLIDWORKS 2015, 2016 and 2017. SOLIDWORKS has created a SPR#1032308 as shown below: The .NET Framework can be hosted by unmanaged components that load the common language runtime into their processes and initiate the execution of managed code, thereby creating a software environment that can exploit both managed and unmanaged features. The .NET Framework not only provides several runtime hosts, but also supports the development of third-party runtime hosts. *This however does not affect Windows
SOLIDWORKS Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
