One of the best things about SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD is the holes types and styles included with the Hole Wizard. If your shop only uses three, four or even a few dozen fasteners, having a larger variety can lead to a decrease in modeling speed. In this Video Tech Tip, you will learn how to customize your Hole Wizard options to a shop-specific format.
Fully defining a sketch is often an essential part of a good design process. With few exceptions, every sketch you create should be fully defined with your design intent inserted via sketch relations and dimensions. Unfortunately, with some sketches are very difficult to do this, and we’re often left wondering what needs to be done to change those blue lines to black. This is where the “Fully Define Sketch” tool can come into play.
Using part configurations is a great way to reuse basic part geometry, cut down on rebuild times with simplified configurations and easily change the length of fasteners. While part configurations can be useful on their own, they really shine when used in an assembly because it can save a tremendous amount of time, and allow one to easily create assembly configurations.
Mouse gestures are activated by simply right clicking and dragging your mouse in a certain direction. This direction corresponds to a SOLIDWORKS command that is set by you in the customization window. In this Video Tech Tip, we demonstrate how using just two commands can save time as well as allow for practice utilizing whichever two commands you use the most.
SOLIDWORKS PDM offers the best way for you to get control of your data, with a secure file vault ensuring that the right person has the right file at the right time.
In this Video Tech Tip, PDM Support Engineer Catherine Smith walks you through two methods on how to access the log file and even how to export it to help make working with TriMech Support easier.
Navigating an assembly in SOLIDWORKS can be a bit tricky and the larger the assembly gets, the more cumbersome it can be. You have to find the components that you want, understand how to rebuild, open times and hide and show just the components that you need. In today’s tech tip video, we’ll cover some fantastic tools that you can use to navigate and view the assembly much faster.
With SOLIDWORKS PDM you can get control of your data- not just SOLIDWORKS data, but all your data. Any file that lives on the Windows Operating System can be stored and managed in the PDM Vault. As you continue to work more and more files will be added to the vault–SOLDIWORKS parts, assemblies, drawings, pdfs, excel workbooks and so on.
For many designs, creating solid geometry with features like boss extrude and cut will get the job done. But for more complicated shapes, it's impossible to build with solid modeling techniques alone. These more complicated geometries will certainly require surfacing techniques. Although the shape might be complicated, the tools and techniques to produce it don’t have to be.
The surfacing tools in SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD are extremely powerful but are easy to learn and use. In this Video Tech Tip, TriMech Application Engineer John Lewis takes an in-depth look at the Ruled Surface feature.
PDM stands for Product Data Management. Think of it as the backbone to an organization’s data. SOLIDWORKS PDM offers not just a secure vault to store files, but also countless other features to help companies function much more efficiently and effectively.
Time is one thing that we can never have enough of and unfortunately, we can’t make more of it. But we can get better at saving time. Reusing sketches means you’re leveraging the geometry you already have so you don’t have to go back and waste time recreating shapes over and over again. In this video tech tip, we have 5 different ways you can save time by reusing sketches.