Save $200 when you register for SolidWorks World 2013 by October 26
It’s hard to believe that the first early-bird deadline for SolidWorks World 2013 is coming up this Friday. In case you’ve forgotten, SolidWorks World is being held January 20-23 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin resort in sunny
... ContinuedSolidWorks Enterprise Licensing Made Simple
You’ve anticipated installing a newer version of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM for the last month. You’ve let everyone know of the impending update. You’ve downloaded the latest service pack from www.SolidWorks.com. You’ve made backups of your SQL databases. You’ve ensured the
... ContinuedCustomizing SolidWorks Flyout Toolbars
The other day while watching a video on some of the new SolidWorks 2013 features, I noticed that one of the Flyout Toolbars for Annotations had a command for Cosmetic Threads that I did not have in my Flyouts, so
... ContinuedNew on Born to Design: Franck Muller designs the world’s most complex watches with SolidWorks
Swiss-based luxury watchmaking company, Franck Muller, is known for making complex watches with hundreds, sometimes thousands of tiny moving parts. In an industry steeped in tradition and precision, see how SolidWorks® software is enabling their engineers to bring new innovations
... ContinuedNew in SolidWorks 2013: Optimize Designs for Sustainability and Materials Costs
SolidWorks 2013‘s new Raw Material Financial Impact Tool quickly evaluates the financial and environmental impacts of a raw material change in real time to enable more informed design decisions. Optimize designs for environmental impact and material cost Find the best
... ContinuedThe Stratos Project: One Giant Freefall for Mankind
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…it’s Felix Baumgartner breaking the skydiving world record from the edge of space. Today in Roswell, NM, the Red Bull Stratos project brought Baumgartner 128,120 ft above the earth
... ContinuedFender Musical Instruments Corporation Rocks at Guitar Production
Music legends such as Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, and Kurt Cobain all have one thing in common aside from greatness: the Fender electric guitar. Offering a wide array 0f electric guitars such as the Stratocaster and
... ContinuedIntersect – The Trimming Shears of the FeatureTree
Like some advanced part and surfacing features, I’ve struggled to know when to use them. Recognizing when and how to use a feature can sometimes turn your part from a tangled FeatureTree mess to a nice efficient tree. I knew
... ContinuedNexxt Spine is developing the next generation of spinal implants with SolidWorks
A few weeks ago Richard Doyle and I were attending some
SolidWorks User Group meetings in the American Midwest. Whenever I go on a tour like
this, I like to spend the day visiting with SolidWorks customers in the area.
During my most recent trip, I met with a very interesting SolidWorks customer
called Nexxt Spine, located in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Nexxt Spine creates spinal implants and instruments for the
medical community. They focus on creating products that are both
high-performance and easy to use. Most of their implants are made to screw
directly into vertebrae and other bones connected to the spinal column, and all
are manufactured in their own facility in Indianapolis.
While I was visiting, the team at Nexxt Spine actually let
me try out the practice system designed for spinal surgeons. As you can see in
the image below, they let me use one of their precision instruments to screw an
implant into a simulated bone.
Change Your Tree: See the Mates First!
Sometimes when working with an assembly, I am more interested in seeing the component mates than the component features. While I know I can expand a component in the FeatureManager tree and then expand the mates folder beneath it, I
... ContinuedMaximize your punkin’ chunkin’ catapult with SolidWorks Simulation
Have you ever wondered how far you could throw a
pumpkin? No? Me neither. However, a lot of people not only give this significant thought, they also meet in a big field to test their weird and wonderful contraptions
at the Punkin' Chunkin' World Championships.
In a nutshell, teams compete to see how far they can launch
a pumpkin by catapult, trebuchet, or air cannon. I first learned about this weird and wonderful completion a while ago, and I
decided that rather than build my own physical catapult and test it, I would do the smart thing–build and test it in SolidWorks first. Now, I
didn’t want to spend a ton of time creating a detailed model to test; I just wanted
a quick and dirty model that I could use to test my design hypothesis and make some initial determinations, namely:
- What beam sections to use on the design?
- Where to put the arm stop?
- What are the impact stresses?
- How far would the pumpkin go?
So my first design was quite basic, but it still had enough
detail to provide meaningful design data. This is a really important point for any design analysis: analyze early and often to get the
maximum benefit.
New in SolidWorks 2013: Weldments, Sheet Metal, and Multi-Body Library Features
New enhancements in SolidWorks 2013 let you quickly design weldments, sheet metal, and multi-body parts and increase standardization. Save time and automate outputs for manufacturing For Weldments—Access overall dimensions of the part bounding box for BOM, cut list, or annotations
... ContinuedRho, Rho, Rho Your Boat: Conics in SolidWorks 2013
SolidWorks 2013 introduces a sketch entity type that was once the soledominion of expensive Class-A surface modeling systems of yesteryear: The Conic Section. As I learned in 10th grade, if you take a cone and slice it with a plane,
... ContinuedHow POLYRACK Makes Its Products “Cool”
Complex technologies, such as desktop computers, involve many different components that have the tendency to overheat, including multiple printed circuit boards. How do you measure the impact of electricity and heat running through your product? POLYRACK Tech-Group employed the help
... ContinuedNew in SolidWorks 2013: Section View Assist
The new Section View Assist feature in SolidWorks 2013 helps you speed the creation of production drawings for faster and more consistent section views. Quickly document the interface between internal components Use specialized functionality to quickly create section views, aligned
... Continued