It’s All About Making Life Easier

Today I ran into an issue that became very frustrating while doing some detailing. This is not something that I do every day so when it became a nuisance I had to do something about it.

A while back I had a blog post about customizing the calloutformat.txt file so that the Hole Callout dimensioning tool would work according to your own company standard (who doesn’t have their own little way of dimensioning, right?). When I set this up for my company I made it so that my drill callout would follow the following format – ‘hw-diam’ (hole diameter) DR. This was great but I would have to go in and manually change the decimal dimension for the hole diameter to a fraction and I we would always have to manually type in a drill callout that was either a number drill or a letter drill.

So today I asked the question to some of the SolidWorks “experts” that I know and I quickly got an answer from Jeremy Regnerus who works for SolidWorks. The solution to my problem was quite simple after I saw it and was a little ashamed that I didn’t know it already. Anyways, I thought it would be good to post it so that if anyone else is struggling with the same thing they can fix their file also. So here is how you do it step by step.

1. The first step is to open up SolidWorks and find out where you Hole Callout Format File is. To do this go to Tools > Options > System Options > File Locations > Hole Callout Format File and then see where it says the location of this text file is and shown below.

2. After you figure this out you will need to go to Windows Explorer and find this file as shown below. If you haven’t done so already it is always a good idea to create a copy of this file before you do any modifying to it. Just be sure to name your copy something different than the original and make all of your changes to the original final named calloutformat.txt.

3. Once you open this you are ready to change your Hole Callout standards. If you are using more than 1 Hole Wizard standard you will need to do this to each standard in this file. The name of the standard will be found where the green box is below. As you can see below in the orange boxes, in all of my plain holes (or drill holes) it will dimension it as the diameter of the hole in my standard 3 place decimal. This is where I want it to call out either a fractional drill, number drill or a letter drill.

4. In order to do this all you need to do is change it from calling out the hole diameter (hw-diam) to call out the fastener size (hw-fstsze). Pretty simple huh?

5. That’s it! Now your Hole Callout dimensioning tool will look like it does below depending on your style that you set up. (Thanks to Jeremy for this screen shot.)

Note that you can also change this on a per drawing basis by selecting the Variable button inside the Dimension Text box and then selecting Fastener Size. This will insert the fastener size into your callout for this dimension ONLY!

CONCLUSION

Disaster averted! My stress level decreased rapidly today after I got this figured out and I soon became the hero of our design group when I filled them in on what I had fixed in our system files.

Thanks again Jeremy for helping me out with this and also to Jim Byrne who helped me out but just a touch after Jeremy sent a reply back.