change on the fly…the infamous thumb wheel

A couple of years back one of the enhancements to SolidWorks was the thumb wheel that appears underneath the dimension in the modify box that appears as shown above.  If you are not familiar with this feature and just thought it was a cute and cuddly graphic that they added you need to know what this does first and foremost.  By simply clicking on the thumb wheel you can drag it either left or right to increase of decrease your dimension, pretty nifty huh?

Changing Your Increments

Now depending on what you use SolidWorks for you may want change the increments that the wheel changes your dimension.  Piece of cake!  All you need to do is go to Tools > Options > System Options > Spin Box Increments.  Here is where you get some different options.  There is 2 different length increments that you can preset, English units and Metric Units.  Then you have the ability to change Angle increments as well.  If you are working on more precise designs you may want to set these increments smaller but if you are working with wide open tolerances you may want these larger.  Totally up to you as long as your mom, dad, wife/husband, kids and the creepy neighbor down the street approve or your decision.

Changing on the Fly

You thought we were done already didn’t ya?  Not so fast!  There are always those times when you want to tighten or loosen up what you set your thumb wheel increments to.  Instead of having to go in each time and change these you can sort of kind of do this on the fly.  By holding down the Ctrl key while spinning the thumb wheel it will increase your set increments times 10.  So lets say you have your increments at 0.10in (as shown above), by holding down the Ctrl key your increments will now be 1.0in until you stop spinning and release the key.  Likewise, if you hold the Alt key while spinning it will decrease your set increments divided by 10.  So in the previous example your increments would be 0.01in.  Nice and simple!

Source of the Information

This is a tip & trick that I learned from Mark Biasotti at the West Michigan SolidWorks User Group meeting that was held on Tuesday, May 12.  This is the awesome kind of stuff that you learn at user group meetings and the best thing about it is that his presentation was on surfacing, but even if that topic is not your forte you can still pick up great tips and tricks like this one.  So if you are not an active or regular member of a user group in your area you need to become one.  If there is not a group in your area, let me know and I will get you the contact information of someone that can hopefully help you start one.