Greg Corke of Develop3D, which is an awesome magazine about anything and everything related to 3D CAD, did an article about how to select a graphics card for use with SolidWorks. To read the article you can see it here OR I would suggest signing up to receive this magazine every other month by clicking here.
SolidWorks graphics card article link courtesy of the SolidWorks UK & Ireland blog.
The title kind of sounds like it could be the headline of a relationship article but this post is actually going to be about fully constraining your model in an assembly. When inserting parts inside of an assembly it is really easy to fix the part and continue on. This allows you to fully constrain a part so that it doesn’t move and it is extremely quick and easy. However, as easy as it is I am a major opponent to the practice of mating because it is easy to quickly float that part, move it a very little amount and fix it again and no one would ever know. That is until the part gets made and stuff comes out wrong.
As is with most things in SolidWorks there is an alternative way to quickly fully constrain a part with only a few quick clicks. When you insert a part into an assembly you can mate the origins of the part with a coincident mate and select “Align axes”. How you may ask, where here you go.
To start simply insert a part into an assembly. Select the origin of the part you just inserted and the origin that you would like it mated to. In the picture below you will see that I want to mate the origin of the part I inserted to the origin of the assembly. After you select the 2 origins select the mate command to begin the process.
Automatically when you do this SolidWorks will select the Coincident mate as your choice, which is correct. Here is where you will notice one difference from what you would normally see with the coincident mate. Underneath this mate you will see a check box for the ability to Align axes. This is automatically selected for you. If you would wish to be able to rotate around the axis you would want to uncheck this option but for what we are trying to accomplish you will want to leave it checked.
Now all you have left to do is accept the mate and your part is now fully constrained inside the assembly as shown below.
Now this option might not always work for you but with a little thought into what you are hoping to accomplish in your assembly when making the part you may be able to incorporate a little design intent so that you are able to use it.
Well, there you have it. Another alternative to a SolidWorks process that is a little safer than just fixing the part wherever it may land in the assembly. I personally still like to mate all 3 planes of my part file to something in the assembly but that is just a personal preference. How do you fully constrain the parts in your assemblies? Let me know!
Hey, it worked! A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post here about the issues that I was having with my work computer. The title of the blog post was “crash and burn”. Well as of Thursday around 1:00 PM I am now off and running. This week when the new SolidWorks Forums went live I wanted to test out and see just how much interaction SolidWorks employees were going to have on there so I posted a topic looking on for an update to SPR #484553. Well I got what I was looking for. Allen Cerny wrote is 1st response since January 9, 2007 and it was a great one. He pointed all of us to the hotfix for this SPR that was just released.
If you have been experiencing these same issues you NEED to refer to this solution in order to fix it. The solution is S-039735 and it includes a hotfix that you can install to fix the problem.
So in closing all I want to say is THANK YOU SolidWorks. You have officially saved me!
Just like what triggered my post last weekend “rocksolid tutorial: modeling a variable profile helix cut” I was recently asked a question by a member of my user group about how to simulate the stroke of a cylinder in SolidWorks. So here we go, this is how I would simulate a simple cylinder stroke in SolidWorks.
As you can see in the above picture I have quickly assembled a bottom plate (green) that is housing a gas cylinder (yellow) in a pocket. I also have a top plate (red) that is mated to the bottom plate with a distance mate called “open/close distance” which we will discuss later. My gas spring was modeled with a simple single sketch profile revolve as you can see below.
By creating my gas spring as a revolve it is extremely easy for me to add a coincident mate between the top of the edge (which represents the end of the gas spring cylinder) and the bottom edge of the top plate. You can see that I have both of those entities highlighted in red in the above picture.
Once you I added this relation you can see that the sketch of my gas spring is now fully defined. You will notice that I also have added a driven dimension on the overall length of the gas spring which I can monitor to make sure that it does not exceed the limits of the stock spring.
Once I have done that you can exit your sketch and stop editing the part in your assembly. Now you are ready to edit the mate that I mentioned earlier. I have named this mate “open/close distance” so that I can quickly find which one I need to change. By editing this mate you can simulate the top plate moving downward towards the bottom plate therefore compressing the gas spring cylinder. You can see in the above picture that my distance “open” distance is 5.170in. When I change this value to 4.170in., which is my closed distance (shown below) you can see that my cylinder compressed like I am wanting to see.
This is just a quick and easy way to simulate this cylinder compression. As is with most things in SolidWorks, there are many ways to accomplish this exact thing. If you prefer using an extruded boss/base cylinder you can use the “Up to Surface” option which will result in the same results. If you have another favorite way to do this type of thing please feel free to share.
Last year the company that I work for decided to begin the process of upgrading the engineering department computers to more of a CAD workstation. Being the CAD Administrator and the IT department I had the privilege (so I thought) of being #1 on the list to receive the first machine that was purchased. So after some investigation we ordered and received a Dell Precision T3400 desktop workstation, Microsoft Vista 64bit, 8GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive, nVidia 1700 graphics card, and Microsoft Office 2007.
When I received the new machine I immediately downloaded SolidWorks 2008 and it ran perfect to my delight. I was extremely happy with my new machine and had no issues, not even with Vista. Around September or October of 2008 I installed SolidWorks 2009 SP0 and this is when the wheels fell off. Crashes, crashes and more crashes. Not with SolidWorks however but with Microsoft Office 2007. Random crashes would occur which is even worse because it is hard to pinpoint the cause of these. One thing I did notice however is that I would only experience crashes if SolidWorks 2009 was running or had been running in that session. Outlook, Word and Excel are almost unusable while SolidWorks is loaded into memory. This caused and is causing much frustration on my end and also my employers end because of constant rebooting in order to clear the system.
I recently have begun hearing from other users that are experiencing the same problem, which makes me feel a little bit better in a sick and twisted kind of way, because at least it is a known problem and it isn’t just me. I wanted to let some of you, my readers, know about this as well so that in case you are experiencing this same problem there are some different forums and discussions going on about this.
Here is a list of forum discussions that have been started about this.
http://forum.solidworks.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=12&threadid=21048
And also a Knowledge Base SPR# for this same thing.
So I guess here is my question to SolidWorks. How can I know that this is not a SPR that is just going to sit idle. If you are a SolidWorks employee that is working on this or know of one that is I would love to talk to them to get an updated status of this SPR because the status of “Open” in the Knowledge Base does not help me out at all. If you are a fellow SolidWorks user that is or was experiencing the same thing please leave a comment and let me know what you are doing as a work around for this.
I do not mean for this blog to become a source of this type of posts but I thought that it was important to inform other users that are seeing the same thing and to let SolidWorks know that it is a VERY IMPORTANT issue to get fixed.
