Part 1: Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 1: Understanding Basic Concepts

Here I am, posting my 1st official “book review” on Matt Lombard’s SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible and I am already late on my goal of 1 chapter a week that I set for myself in my post a couple of weeks ago titled The Day I Have Been Waiting For! I guess enough wasting time and lets get started:

The first section in the book is titled Understanding Basic Concepts. This 1st chapter gives a great idea of what is expected of the readers before they even get too deep into the book. This was great for myself to know right away what I could expect later on in the book and to find out what was expected of me. Lucky enough for me I own Matt’s other book SolidWorks 2007 Bible which I think will be a huge asset if I am struggling with a particular area that he is talking about.

I personally feel that this book is going to be a great learning tool and reference source for me later on. Currently I do not have a deep knowledge of the surfacing area inside of SolidWorks but I want to learn and I feel that this is will be a wonderful resource for me. If you are in a similar situation that I am do not get scared off from purchasing this book. I believe that anyone that has a desire to learn the software will be able to with the way that Matt writes. In closing I am really looking forward to the rest of this book and I look forward to letting you know as I go through it what I am learning and what the book as to offer so stay tuned! Hopefully the next review of the book won’t be as far off on timing as this one!

If you haven’t already heard, SolidWorks today announced that the have purchased Priware. Priware’s chief product was the popular SolidWorks add on CircuitWorks. Starting with SolidWorks 2008 sp4.0 CircuitWorks will now be included in the Premium package of the SolidWorks software. If you can’t wait until the next release to get this product you can go to the Downloads and Updates page and get CircuitWorks sp3.0 right now.

If you want to view the press release you can view it here: SolidWorks acquires CircuitWorks provider Priware

If you are already a CircuitWorks customer or reseller click here for information about how this will affect you.

Devon Sowell and Ricky Jordan have also already posted about this so be sure to check out their sites also. And Richard Doyle seems extremely excited about this also so check out what he has to say about it.

I recently had the chance to view a demo of an unbelievably powerful program called TactonWorks and was completely blown out of the water by what it capable of doing. TactonWorks is a Design Automation/Knowledge Based Engineering program produced by Tacton Systems AB. There was some big news that came out of the TactonWorks stable this week in a press release that announced that it had officially become a Certified Gold Partner. To view the official press release follow this link: Tacton Becomes Certified Gold Partner. All I can say is that you HAVE to check this program out because it is awesome! You can watch online demos of the software if you follow this link and click on the links on the right of the page.

A quick snippet of a sample program that I viewed was a sudoku puzzle where you could input what ever numbers that you were given and it would within seconds complete the rest of the puzzle, and all of this is done within your SolidWorks model. It was unbelievably quick and accurate. So once again all I can say is that you have to check it out for yourself.

If you are heading to SolidWorks World next week make sure you stop by their booth(#315) and ask for a demo. From what I understand there will be more than enough willing people at the booth that will be happy to show you the power of the software. Watching this demo WILL make your SolidWorks World complete!

If you are not attending SolidWorks World next week and would like to contact a reseller to set up a demo, drop me an email and I will be more than happy to get you the contact information of the reseller I have been talking to.

There is a new user community on the Internet that might interest some SolidWorks users. DriveWorksXpress now has an online community that will offer discussion forums and an area that allows you to download tutorials and sample files. As most of you now know DriveWorksXpress is now included in SolidWorks 2008 so check it out, it may become an extremely useful place to get information for when you set up your rules based Design Automation.

Over the past couple of weeks I have done a lot of thinking about how to set up templates for commonly used designs to speed up design time. In the industry that we are in (deep drawn metal stamping) almost all of our jobs have multiple stations that lead to producing the final product. In most cases the majority of these stations are common designs that may only be different by a few dimensions. So with these facts in front of me and multiple due dates all piled on top of each other has forced me to begin thinking about how to speed up my design time so that I can hit ALL of these due dates without a problem. Around a year ago I began to dabble with a product call DriveWorks which is a design automation program that runs inside of SolidWorks. Now at the time I messed around with it the price tag scared our company off having just spent the money to switch to SolidWorks and CamWorks. But here is the kicker, in SolidWorks 2008 SolidWorks has partnered with DriveWorks to incorporate a program called DriveWorksXpress included in the software. Now it just means that I have to find the time to play around with it more and set it up to benefit our company, I do believe this is a breakout session at SolidWorks World that I will have to attend.

If you want more information about this product you need to check out Jeff Mirisola’s Blog because he has just sat through a 3 day training event on DriveWorks.