Well, over the past couple of weeks posts on here have been few and far between and a flurry of them at the beginning of March.  This lack of posts in mainly due to a crazy busy schedule that I have been trying to maintain for the last couple of weeks.

The craziness started towards the beginning of last week when I was attempting to line up and finalize everything that I needed for the West Michigan SolidWorks User Group meeting that was held last week Tuesday (March 11).  The response for this meeting was needless to say overwhelming!  We had a record turnout of around 40-45 users which is a lot in the West Michigan area for a meeting that is held on the majority of the attendees own time.  The reason for the high attendance is unknown but could possibly have something to do with the great presentations that we had from Brian Gilson on SolidWorks WORLD 2009 and Mike Puckett on the Certification area of SolidWorks and mold design.  There is no greater feeling than when you have to set up more chairs because you weren’t planning on that many people, what a great problem to have.

The next day was one of the best days as a SolidWorks user that I have ever had.  Myself, Mike Puckett and Marc Nelson (Greenville High School SolidWorks teacher) spent the day together touring some companies that use SolidWorks.  The day started with Mike & myself taking a tour of a company located in Zeeland, Michigan called Gentex Corporation.  Gentex is one of the leading suppliers of mirrors to the automotive industry and also are involved in making windows for the airline industry with a little bit of fire protection products sprinkled in.  Gentex is a very cool company that is very technologically advanced.  Mike Garvelink was our tour guide as he everything from the assembly lines that were designed in SolidWorks, to their machine shop which uses a combination of SolidWorks and CamWorks to their product development offices which use Catia mainly due to their relationship with the automotive industry.  All in all this was a really cool tour that gave myself a good feel for just how diverse SolidWorks can be.  Check out the Gentex website here.

Next up we were off to Greenville High School to sit in on one of Marc Nelson classes.  Mike gave a presentation about SolidWorks that included some of the common products that we use everyday and were designed in SolidWorks to how his career path led him to work directly for SolidWorks.  Mike became in instant hit when he handed out SolidWorks licenses to the students that were in the class so that they could load it on their personal computers at home.  One thing that Mike kept saying was “now I know why Marie Planchard loves her job so much!”  It was great to see all these kids really excited about using SolidWorks.  Thanks for this opportunity Marc!

After we left the school we were off to a company called Aggressive Tooling in Greenville, Michigan.  This company make fixtures for the automotive companies, mainly specializing in exhaust system testing and welding.  They use SolidWorks to create all of the fixtures / machines and also have some great macros that they have wrote to assist in the design processes.

To end the SolidWorks user tour we swung in by Wolverine World Wide in Rockford, Michigan.  Wolverine is the maker of popular brand name boots and shoes such as Sebago, Hush Puppies, Wolverine, Merrell, Track ‘n Trail, CAT, Bates, Harley Davidson Footwear, and Patagonia Footwear.  Wolverine is using SolidWorks surfacing capabilities to design and reverse engineer the soles of these shoes.  It was really cool to see some of their products and to realize just how much work is involved in designing these up for production.  Their processes were very similar to what was shown on the main stage at SolidWorks WORLD 2009 by New Balance shoes.  This again cemented the fact to me how diverse and broad the capabilities of SolidWorks really are.  Thanks to Chris Peterson for showing us just how they are using SolidWorks at Wolverine World Wide.

The day ended with some great conversations over dinner with Mike and Marc.  Thanks to everyone involved in making this a really great day for me.  To read what Mike had to say about the day you can check out his blog post here.

The rest of the week included some birthday parties for family mixed in with a busy work environment right now made for a busy week for me.  This week started off much the same for me.  I have started something new in the West Michigan area for a hand selected group of SolidWorks CAD Administrators.  I have formed a group called “SolidWorks CAD Admin Focus Group” which is 6 SolidWorks Admins from this local area that are going to meet once a month or so for lunch or dinner and discuss anything and everything related to managing a group of SolidWorks licenses and managing the SolidWorks system.  These discussions range from VAR’s and VAR support to macros that we use to add on products that are used to templates to what ever you can think of behind the scenes in SolidWorks.  We had our first meeting on Wednesday and it was everything plus more of what I expected from this group.  There was great discussion and what was planned on around 1 1/2 hour lunch turned into closer to 2 1/2 hour lunch break.  This group is going to be VERY beneficial to me and hopefully the others to bounce ideas off of and form relationships with.  I will definitely keep you informed of how this group goes in the future.

There you have it, March Madness RockSolid style!  Hopefully I will be gaining some time to post more here coming up now that things have calmed down SLIGHTLY, that is other than the real March Madness that I am always interested in.  So to close all I can say is GO BLUE!