TriMech Blog

You've invested in SOLIDWORKS for your 3D designs, now what? You want to know what the best hardware is to optimize your investment and get the most out of your software. Learn what works best for your specific needs in our blog.

Good looking parts start with great design. This is no secret among the engineering community. Thanks to software like SOLIDWORKS and the many advancements in 3D printing, building complex objects in the digital world and translating them into the real world is more achievable than ever. In this article, I demonstrate how to optimize your design and orient your 3D part file for successful and great looking prints using an FDM-style 3D printer such as the MakerBot Replicator+.

“Garbage in, gospel out.” A slightly different take on the old adage, this is a popular perspective on analysis results. But we engineers know better, right? Simulation results are generally only as good as the inputs to the problem. Or at least, you need to understand the limits of your engineering assumptions, and guide your interpretation of results accordingly. There are however many times you’re certain your simulation results are wrong, and yet you can’t figure out why.

2017 has been a big year for Stratasys with the release of the new F123 Series 3D printers and Nylon 12CF. As if that wasn't enough for the 3D printing community, Stratasys just released two new materials—SR-35 soluble support material and Digital ABS Plus/Digital ABS2 Plus.

Welcome to our blog series, Undocumented Features in SOLIDWORKS, dedicated to the lesser-known new features. They might not be as popular as the cool kids, but we think they still deserve a seat at the lunch table.

If you have not heard about the term 3DIM or 3D injection molds, it has been around for several years. Originally, this started with prototype injection molds out of aluminum and served the purpose of pre-phase or beta versions and functional testing for the R&D process. While this process was faster than using traditional P21 tooling, it still required a large investment of time and money to get a simple tool. Thanks to 3DIM and Stratasys PolyJet 3D printers, we now have a more streamlined process.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize has taken renders of SOLIDWORKS designs above and beyond what PhotoView 360 was ever capable of. By tweaking the appearance settings like Tile Value, Roughness and Index of Refraction, it’s much easier to control exactly how materials will appear in the final render. Let’s take a look at an example.

Many 3D printers, including Stratasys FDM 3D printers like the Fortus line, require different tips to print different layer heights. So which tip is going to help you print the perfect part? We help answer that question in our blog by sharing some simple tips on tips!

Taking a design from a concept to a physical artifact that exists in the real world is exhilarating. With the design help from SOLIDWORKS in part 1, the analysis help from Simulation in part 2 and help from solidThinking Inspire in part 3, the kayak frames are now optimized for 3D printing. To close our the series, in video four we walk through choosing the proper 3D printing technology and options to build our parts.

Having already designed the wood stringers with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD in part 1 and refined the shape of the kayak for buoyancy, stability and draw with Flow Simulation in part 2,  the third step in designing a 3D printed kayak is designing the interior structure. In this blog, I show how to create the geometry to hold those stringers in place.

Last week, we released the first video of a four-part series showcasing our process of designing and 3D printing a skin-on-frame kayak. We theorized that with SOLIDWORKS solutions, designing and testing a skin-on-frame kayak would take far less effort than traditional methods, allowing us to ultimately 3D print and build a full-size kayak with relative ease, to test on open waters. In the first video segment we completed the initial design in SOLIDWORKS, allowing us to move on to testing part-two of the series.

With summer upon us, it is time for my favorite pastime (other than using SOLIDWORKS): Kayaking! And this year I have a brand new boat to play with.

See the entire design process of the TriMech kayak, from idea to production and launch, by reading our four-part blog series. In this first video, I go over how to use SOLIDWORKS to create the initial concept of the kayak by using a historic design for inspiration. Watch the video below.