Posted by Jason on April 26, 2008
Well I think I am starting to get some of these issues that I was having with Blogger worked out. I am hoping that the switch to WordPress will make this blog a little bit better in a bunch of different areas. Thanks for you patience with the switchover and hopefully we are in the home stretch for getting the switch done.
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
Posted by Jason on April 25, 2008
Have you ever wondered if it is possible to copy a drawing and then associate it to another similar part. Maybe the new part has 1 or 2 dimensions that are different from the original part and you don’t feel like spending the time redrawing something that you already did. Well it is possible, maybe you already knew this but I have seen some topics on the different discussion forums that are asking if this is possible or not. So here is a step but step process for copying a drawing and then how to associate it to another similar model.
The first step is to find the drawing that you want to use as your template. Once you find it you need to right click on it and select copy.
After you have copied your “template” drawing you need to browse to the file folder where you want to copy the drawing into. Right click on a blank area of the screen and select paste.
Once you have pasted the “template” drawing into the new file folder you need to right click and select rename or slow click the copied file to rename it to your new file name.
Now that you have renamed your new drawing you need to select the new file. Once you have the new drawing highlighted select the References button towards the bottom of the “Open” window.
Once the “Edit Referenced File Locations” window opens double click on the part model icon to open the next window which allows you to browse to the new part model that you want to associate your new drawing to. Once you have found your new model click the Open button.
Once your new file has been associated to the drawing it should show up in green in the “Edit Referenced File Locations” window. If this is green click the OK button.
Now you should be ready to open the new drawing and double check to make sure that the models associated correctly (which it should) to the copied drawing.
This is an quick way to reuse drawings for similar models. BE SURE to follow these steps in the order I have shown so that things associate correctly. If used correctly you will find this trick to be very beneficial if you have a lot of parts that are very similar.
Posted in RockSolid Tutorials | 7 Comments »
Posted by Jason on April 22, 2008
As some of you may have seen there has been some discussion lately about whether or not the presentations from SolidWorks World 2008 should be made available to anyone and everyone or should they just be available to this years attendees.
Matt Lombard started this discussion last week when he
posted a link to his FTP which contained all of the presentations from SWW. 2 days later Matt started a
SolidWorks World Presentation Ownership Poll titled “Is SolidWorks justified in keeping the SWWorld presentations behind a login?” that received 61 votes with the winning answer being “No, the presentations belong to the creators” which received 31% followed by 25% for “Yes, they organized the event so the can control access to the content”.
Because of the responses and results to the poll Matt decided to try calling Greg Jankowski one
more time before publishing as he put it “another scathing blog post”. Greg informed Matt that SolidWorks had decided to make all of the presentations available to everyone. But just in cased you really wanted to read Matt’s “scathing blog post”, he still posted it this at the bottom of his Control of SolidWorks Presentations blog post.
Late this afternoon Richard Doyle made the announcement that the presentations were available in the SolidWorks Customer Portal. Once you get in the Customer Portal browse over to the left side of your screen and look under the Links (left) heading to find your link to the SolidWorks World 2008 information. Or you can access it right here.
So for now this is a closed subject and as Matt said…“Score one for the SolidWorks Community!”
Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »
Posted by Jason on April 19, 2008
Late yesterday afternoon I received an unexpected but very exciting message in my inbox from
Amazon. Back in the beginning of March I ordered
Matt Lombard’s latest masterpiece,
SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible. Matt is also the author of my #1 SolidWorks book,
SolidWorks 2007 Bible. This book in my eyes is a MUST HAVE for any SolidWorks user. Matt did an excellent job with that book so I can only imagine what this next one will be like. I also noticed that you can now buy both books from Amazon in a
package deal for only $62.98, now that is a deal!
You also have the opportunity to win Matt’s Surfacing book if you can help out Ben Eadie over at SolidMentor. Check out the details of his problem and corresponding contest here.
Anyways, back to the email I received. This book was not supposed to ship out until April 28 but it sounds like things are ahead of schedule and it is now supposed to ship out on April 21 (Monday) with an estimated delivery date of April 24-April 28. This is a book that I have really been anticipating because I always have an interest in learning more about the surfacing aspect of SolidWorks seeing that I do not get the opportunity to explore this part of the software with my job. Maybe this upcoming week won’t be so bad after all, I guess its always good to have something to look forward to at the end of the work week.
If you want a more detailed description of Matt’s 2 books you can check them out by following these 2 links:
SolidWorks 2007 Bible
SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
Posted by Jason on April 19, 2008
In the Midwest this is the time of year that you begin to see more and more people outside working on their lawns, finishing outside projects that were started last fall, out for walks and so on. This is also the time that a lot lawn care businesses around here have begun what they call spring cleaning which consists of getting everything ready for the upcoming summer and fall, getting rid of all the "junk" that has accumulated over the winter and making sure that everything is in tip top shape.
Well as a CAD Administrator or just a SolidWorks user sometimes you too need to do a little spring cleaning of your computer system and CAD files. At the company I work for I recently created a low end PDM system and in the process of this I took on the task of doing some serious cleaning up of CAD files and other general business files. After doing this once I am hoping that I NEVER have to do this again. What a pain but then again this probably had not been done in over 5 years so it was well overdue. That is why if you put your mind to doing this every spring you can easily stay on top of it.
In the industry that we are in there is often a need to quickly create a sketch or model in order to quickly get 1 dimension. Sometimes these files get saved, sometimes not, sometimes saved in good places that will remind you to clean them up and sometimes in places that are in 5-10 folders deep that you happen to stumble across once or twice a year. This is partly a product of the industry we are in and partly a lack of discipline on us for not saving this in the right place or deleting them ourselves when we are finished with them. Anyways, all of these files are tying up network space or possibly space on your hard drive. That is why it is good to set up a schedule to go through your files and delete the dead weight files.
Another aspect of spring cleaning is basic computer maintenance. This includes cleaning out your temporary files, disk defragmenting, error checking and so on. There have been some great blog posts written lately that assist you in this.
Matt Lorono has done a awesome series called SolidWorks Performance Blitz! which covers a multitude of different things that you can do to clean up your system and then tips and tricks that you can do that will speed up your computer also. Here are the links to his 4 part series:
1. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 1: /3GB Switch)
2. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 2: Anti-Virus Tip/Trick)
3. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 3: Virtual Memory)
4. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 4: Computer Processor)
Ricky Jordan also recently did an article on the SolidWorks Rx 2008 tool that comes with SolidWorks. Inside this tool is a System Maintenance tab that assists you in cleaning up some of the temp files among other things.
All in all their are a lot of resources and programs that are available online that will help you clean up your computer and this is something that should be done on a regular basis. So set up a schedule, clean your system and purge the dead files off of your network. This will definately benefit you later on down the road if you have a clean system in place.
Posted in Miscellaneous, SolidWorks Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
CALLING ALL MEMBERS OF THE SOLIDWORKS COMMUNITY!!!
Well as I posted this past weekend I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the next addition to my book shelf. As I stated in my post 
