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 February 14, 2008
This is a new feature that I would like to begin adding to my blog as long as I can continue to find the right combination of interesting and useful tutorials to share. The first tutorial that I deemed interesting and useful is how to customize the SolidWorks Hole Wizard and then the calloutformat.txt file so that the Hole Callout dimension tool works in conjunction with your Hole Wizard standard. This is a topic that I have wanted to show people for some time and while at SolidWorks World this year Ed Eaton shared some information regarding this topic during his presentation with Phil Sluder. He had received a request from someone to help them with this exact issue. As coincidence would have it, while I was talking to someone that works for our VAR soon after SolidWorks World they told me that someone had asked them for help with the exact same issue. I took this as my sign that I needed to show this to the 2 people that read this blog. So here it is:
Customizing SW Hole Wizard & calloutformat.txt
Please let me know what you think about this tutorial and how you feel about me adding this type of content. Enjoy!
Posted in RockSolid Tutorials, SolidWorks Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »
Posted by Jason on October 13, 2007
Once again I am going to sound like a broken record, it is been a while since I have posted anything mainly because of how extremely busy we have been at work lately and most recently because I got my new computer so there have been some busy nights this past week trying to transfer everything and make sure I do not loose any data in the process. I have been wanting to post about a topic that I posted on the SolidWorks Discussion Forum back in January that dealt with how to mate 2 radii together (Mating a Radius To Another Radius Problem) so that if you change the size of one of the radii it will dynamically move the other part so that the 2 radii stay in contact with each other. The feedback I received from different individuals was that SolidWorks did not really have a good solution to do this. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across this same situation and I think I may have found a way to solve my problems (well at least my design problems). On the first piece I created I placed the origin at the top center of the part and on the second piece I placed the origin at the bottom center of the part. When I mated the 2 pieces together I ended up mating the origins with a coincident relationship so that in the sketch I could add a tangent relationship between the 2 radii. This allowed me to change the radius and/or diameter of either piece and the pieces would move accordingly. I think this may have solved what I was looking to do. Let me know if you have any comments about this method or if you foresee any problems that I could run into.
Posted in RockSolid Tutorials | No Comments »
