The SolidWorks Blog

Simplify Your Models Using the Intersect Tool

Has this ever happened to you?

Imagine that you get this super complex model with a lot of intricate internal details from your customer or supplier. The file size is huge and the rebuild times are long, considering that you only need it for any one of these reasons:

• Use your customer’s model as a reference for modeling a nest in a fixture or tooling. You need to remove all the interior details.
• Use your customer’s model as a reference for modeling an enclosure around it. You need to keep only the external faces.
• Insert your supplier’s model as one item in your assembly and BOM. You need to remove as many details as possible,
• Just need to 3D Print it for your customer. You need to remove all the cavities (completely “fill” the model).

The first thing you will try is, of course, using the Defeature tool (introduced in SolidWorks 2011). But what can be done when defeature does not produce the expected results?

Starting with SolidWorks 2013 the answer is simple: use the magic of the new Intersect Tool to fill any internal cavities and also merge all the solid bodies that touch (on faces) or intersect each other.

Watch this video for a demonstration of this procedure:

  

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Alin Vargatu is an Elite Applications Engineer and CSWE at Javelin Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a regular contributor to the Javelin blog.

Want to try out SolidWorks? You can request a free SolidWorks trial on our website.

Want to see how SolidWorks can help you win new business and get to market faster? Request a  SolidWorks demo today.

SolidWorks Composer: An Easy Way to Rotate Actors

I have to credit this trick to Scott Lidgey.

When you are rotating an actor in SolidWorks Composer, you can control the amount of revolution and make sure it rotates at a constant velocity. The trick to this is to click on the triad when you go to rotate and do not drag it. You will notice the property task pane ask you how many degrees. Now you can type any number you want and the actor will rotate that over time. I have created a video show this process.

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Matt Campbell is an Applications Expert at Javelin Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a regular contributor to the Javelin blog.

Want to try out SolidWorks? You can request a free SolidWorks trial on our website.

Want to see how SolidWorks can help you win new business and get to market faster? Request a  SolidWorks demo today.

"Set Document Property" for SolidWorks Enterprise PDM Users

Most people know that "Set Document Property (Sldsetdocprop) can be used to make a SolidWorks Toolbox part behave like a normal part, but did you know you can use the same tool to make a normal part behave like a Toolbox part?

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM users all across the land think this is cool.  Here is why:

Checkout this screen shot from EPDM’s “Copy Tree” command:

See the part cleverly named: “I want this part to work like a toolbox part.sldprt”? This part is just a simple part like all of the others except I changed it into a Toolbox part with the sldsetdocprop command. Now, by default, “Copy Tree” does not try to copy this file. I don’t have to dig through my copy list trying to figure out which are my standard/toolbox parts that I don’t want to copy, Copy Tree does this for me now!

"Set Document Property" can work on an entire directory, so if you have a directory of commercial parts, it may be worth your while to change all the parts in that directory to become a “toolbox” part.

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Jeff Sweeney is an Application Engineer at 3DVision Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  He is a regular contributor to 3DVision Technologies' Blog where you will find new ideas to improve your productivity with SolidWorks.

New in SolidWorks 2013: Enhanced Enterprise PDM Workflow and User Properties

SolidWorks 2013 includes some great enhancements for Enterprise PDM. You can now route documents and contact users more efficiently with enhanced workflow and expanded SolidWorks Enterprise PDM user properties.

• Reduce delays and accelerate your time-to-market
• Simplify process mapping requiring multiple approvers with parallel workflow transitions
• Automatically keep interested parties updated with Workflow Timers
• Display user’s current status with Presence Note
• Provide instant links to connect with user property pop-ups

See more in the video below, and visit our new SolidWorks 2013 website to learn about the other new features, as well as find a reseller seminar near you.

Cutting All Ties: Best Practices for Removing External References

Designing parts using the Top-Down assembly modeling technique can be extremely useful. If a component is designed with the “top-down” technique, this means it is born in the assembly environment and it is designed using references to other parts within that assembly. Parts that are designed “top-down” have the advantage of being able to update when related geometry in the assembly updates, much like features update in the part environment when other related features are changed.

This can save a lot of time and hassle when it is a desired result, but it can also cost a lot of time and hassle when it is not. What happens when the User A wants to take a component that is designed “top-down” and use it in an assembly other than the one it was originally designed in? User B may decide to adjust the original assembly and before you know it, User A has a part that has mysteriously changed shape so that it no longer meets their design intent. The key in preventing these undesired updates in “top-down” designed parts is properly removing the external references that relate one part to another (or many others, for that matter).

Step 1: Open the Part

  When you open a part that has been designed using the “top-down” technique, you may notice that certain features and sketches in the design tree are appended by the notation “->?” This means that those specific features and sketches contain external references to a document that is not currently open. A feature that does not have external references may also display this notation if the sketch that is a parent to the feature does have external references. You can right click on any externally referencing feature and chose “Edit In Context” to open the assembly that this component references. You will notice once this assembly is opened, the notation next to these features and sketches change from “->?” to “->”.    

 

 

Step 2: Save the Part

If you are now planning on removing the external references to a part that was not originally your design, you should consider that the person who designed this component originally may still want the part to update in the context of their original assembly. It is best practice to use “Save As…” to save your version of the part. When you chose to “Save As…” you will get a message saying you are about to replace the original document with the new one in the assembly unless you check “Save as copy” in the “Save As…” dialogue. Please be sure to choose to “Save as copy”.

 

Step 3: View the External References

You may wish to see a list of every external reference in the component. This can give you a good idea of what you need to adjust in order for your part to be “free” to stand on its own. Simply right click on the part name in the feature tree and chose “List External References” in the drop down menu. A window similar to the one below will appear:

This window can provide you with detailed information on every external reference in the model. It also provides you with the options to “Break All”, “Lock All” and “Unlock All”. These options can be used as an alternative to removing the references manually. “Lock All” locks or freezes the references until they are unlocked at a later date. This means that changes to the original assembly will not affect this new component. It is fully reversible by choosing to “Unlock All”. However, it does not make adjusting geometry an easy task because much of the geometry may still be tied into the original assembly. “Break All” will blindly break these references, and it is NOT recommended in any circumstance.

  

Step 4: Removing the External References

It is finally time to actually purge the model of all these external references. This can be a tedious process, depending on how much of the model is dependent on its parent assembly. The key is to start with the latest change and work your way up the feature tree to the oldest changes. Working from the bottom up in the Feature Manager helps prevent rebuild errors.

Most of the external references are likely to reside in the sketch environment. These references will be in the form of relations and dimensions created to the geometry of other parts in the original assembly. These relations and dimensions must be deleted so that the sketch geometry can be redefined internally. Below is an example of a sketch that was created using “Convert Edges”. These edges no longer exist, so the “On Edge” relation must be replaced.

Any easy way to do this is to use the “Display/Delete Relations” dialogue. Through this dialogue, it is easy to delete all relations, leaving the sketch completely under undefined: A simple sketch like this one can be fully defined with only a few relations and dimensions, however it may be more difficult to constrain a sketch with more complicated geometry. The following sketch shows how this can be easily accomplished:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This sketch has “On Edge” and co-linear relations to another part. You may also notice that there are some dimensions that don’t seem to point to any edges. This is because these edges exist in another model. These are all references that need to be removed and replaced. You can easily get rid of these relations by choosing to delete all relations in the “Display/Delete Relations” dialogue, however, that would also result in the deletion of a number of internal relations in this sketch. If you don’t wish to take a chain saw to the entire sketch, but want a fast and easy way of deleting the unwanted relationships, there is a filter in the “Display/Delete Relations” tool to only view external references. From here you can easily delete ONLY the external references and maintain the rest:

You can see that all of the symmetry relations are maintained as well as the dimensions that do not reference another components geometry.

This sketch is still very much under defined, so another tool that can be used is “Fully Define Sketch”. This tool allows you to select relations you’d like SolidWorks to look for in the sketch. It also allows you to define a base point or base line for SolidWorks to dimension the sketch to. Once these selections are made, you may get the following message:

This means the geometry itself is fully defined, but the location is not. The easiest way to get a fully defined sketch at this point is to dimension your geometry to the origin of the part.

 

In the end, you want your feature manager tree to look something like this. You’ll notice, all of those pesky notations from before (“->?” and “->”) are gone, showing that you part is all grown up – it can now survive on its own, independent of the assembly it was born in!

There are many other techniques that may be used for freeing a part from its external references. Apart from the sketch environment, sketch planes can be edited so that only internal planes are referenced and extruded features can be edited so that geometry from other parts isn’t used for “offset” or “up to” start and end conditions. All of these techniques (and more) are taught in our Advanced Assembly class. For more information on classes, click here.

Want to try out SolidWorks? You can request a free SolidWorks trial on our website.

Want to see how SolidWorks can help you win new business and get to market faster? Request a  SolidWorks demo today.

Wonders of Weldments

3+ Way Mitres in Weldments

When building steel frames, particularly in circular tube you can strange results when 3 or more tubes come together and you and to trim them all back. You could end up with something like this:

So how can I make it look like this?

It's all in the trim order. Edit the Structural Member feature and click on the joint so you get the Corner Treatment Dialogue box.

What we are looking for is the Trim Order settings at the bottom. For each of the groups simply set the Trim order to 1 and they will all mitre together. It even works for 4 or more segments:

 To see this in action you can check out our youtube page.

Creating a profile wrap for cutting

When working with tube in this way it can be tricky to work out how to cut the tube back to the correct finish so that it will fit first time. What a number of people do is create a flattened version of the tube and print it out so that they can cut out the printed profile and wrap the paper around the tube so that it can be marked for cutting.

Here's how to do it.

First we need to save the bodies out. I could do this in the original part, but I'd prefer to keep these files separate. You can either save each of the bodies out to individual parts, or you can do as I did here, right-click on the CutList folder and select insert into new part. Then do a 1 degree cut in the tube:

Ensure that you only cut that one body.

Then use Insert bends from the sheet metal toolbar

Setting the K-Factor to 1 ensures that the outer face of the tube will not change in length when flattened.

 Repeat for the other bodies and you are then ready to print the profiles. Simply create the flat patterns for each. You could also use the export to .dxf to create quick simple profiles for the guys on the shop floor.

So there you have it a couple of tips for working with weldments.

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Gordon Stewart is an Elite Applications Engineer & CSWE at TMS CAD Centre, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller in Scotland. He is a regular contributor to the TMS CAD Centre blog.

Assembly Visualization - the search for the missing file properties

Releasing your drawings to the machine shop with missing information makes a machinist angrier than a baby boomer looking at a teenager that doesn’t have his pants pulled up all the way.

As we all know, looking through a large assembly, checking file properties can be a tedious task. (At least that is the excuse I always use.) I’ve found Assembly Visualization can be a great tool to quickly skim through your assembly’s components looking for missing information.

Here’s how I could use it to find any parts in my assembly without material specified:

1. Start the Visualization tool (it is either on your assembly or evaluate toolbar by default)

2. Right mouse button click on any of the headers (except “File Name”) and choose “Add Column”, or find any column with a little black arrow pointing to the right.

3. Click on that arrow and choose “More…”

4. Choose the property you want to examine. (Check it out, you could work with formula too!)

5. Now you can sort by this property by clicking on its heading and your parts with missing information will come to the top.

This makes it easy to fix missing definitions quickly and make that floor supervisor happy!

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Jeff Sweeney is an Application Engineer at 3DVision Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  He is a regular contributor to 3DVision Technologies' Blog where you will find new ideas to improve your productivity with SolidWorks

Clean Up Your SolidWorks Drawings With Auto Arrange Dimensions

One of my favorite enhancements to drawings over the past couple of years has got to be Auto Arrange Dimensions. This might be as close as you get to an ‘easy’ button in drawings. See the image below to discover a drawing view with the dimensions in a complete mess

To fix this in flash, SolidWorks introduced Auto Arrange Dimensions in the 2011 release. This function will automatically arrange the selected dimensions for you. The procedure is as follows:

1. Box-select all of the dimensions.
2. Next, move the mouse pointer over the Dimension Palette rollover button to display the dimension palette. (Incidentally, if you mouse AWAY from the Dimension Palette rollover button, it will disappear. To get it back just hit the CTRL button on your keyboard.)
   
3. On the Dimension Pallete, click Auto Arrange Dimensions in the lower left corner
4. Click in the graphics area to turn off the Dimension Pallete – Easy!
   

When you use Auto Arrange Dimensions, the selected dimensions are placed as follows:

• Spaced from smallest to largest
• Aligned and centered, if possible
• Spaced with the offset distances defined in Document Properties – Dimensions
• Adjusted to avoid overlapping
• Staggered, if necessary

There are a number of other tools on the Dimension Palette that you will also want to check out for when you have multiple dimensions selected and you want to make some adjustments – including Space Evenly Linear/Radial, Align Collinear, Align Stagger, Justify Text and Dimension Spacing Value (either numerical input or thumbwheel). Enjoy.

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Chris Snider is an Application Engineer at 3DVision Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  He is a regular contributor to 3DVision Technologies' Blog where you will find new ideas to improve your productivity with SolidWorks.

Tips for Using Enterprise PDM’s Label Function

Remember that kid that was always picked last to be on the kickball team? I think SolidWorks Enterprise PDM’s Label function was that kid.

What good is it? I have seen it used three different ways.

First, versions that have a label are never cold storaged. Add a label to a version and you will always know it will be there when needed.

Second, you can search for text inside a label. Imagine you have a group of files that you use often. You can give them all the same label. Then, when you search, you can have them all come up together for quick access (think favorite search).

Third, you can use a label as a milestone in your file’s history. Perhaps: “This is the version approved by the FDA” or “Customer rejected this version” or “This file was rolled back because of…”.

An interestingly unique trait of labels is that you can change and even delete them. I don’t know of any other entity stored in a file’s history that can be deleted.

I think that little kid just kicked a ground rule double!

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Jeff Sweeney is an Engineering Data Specialist at 3DVision Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  He is a regular contributor to 3DVision Technologies' Blog where you will find new ideas to improve your productivity with Enterprise PDM and SolidWorks.
 

Configurable PDM

Part of my job as Product Manager at DS SolidWorks Corp is to visit customers and see how they are using our technology. I love to ask how they did things before implementing our software, what productivity gains they have made, what pros and cons they could speak to and how things have changed overall.

I was blown away in one of my last visits where a customer had been implementing a competitors PLM solution for the past two years, but still had not moved into the production roll out phase. Whenever they wanted to make a simple change to the PLM system, they had to call the PLM vendor and schedule a service call which would take about two (2) weeks. Once the consultant was on-site, they would spend about two (2) days programming and customizing the PLM toolkit in order to fulfill the request.

 

Last year they decided to try SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (EPDM) as an alternative to the never-ending PLM project and were able to get this system into production in less than 6 months. The time would have been even less, but this project was combined with a re-engineering initiative.

The most startling difference between the two systems seems to be in the approach of building up a PDM system with simple and highly configurable administrative tools versus a PLM toolkit approach that requires very specialized, expensive and time-consuming customization. The customer told me, “changes that took 2 weeks to schedule and 2 days to accomplish with our failed PLM implementation, now take less than 10 minutes 95% of the time for me to change myself”.

We take this customer feedback to heart and will continue to provide easy-to-setup and configure tools to enable our customers to get into production quickly with new solutions, achieve fast returns on investment (ROI) and increase productivity over time with additional changes that can be made in-house. If you have any feedback or stories on the concept of configuring versus customizing (programming) we would love to hear from you.