As most engineers know there is need for an easy communication method between the engineering department and the sales department and in turn the customer. When you are using a 3D modeling program, such as SolidWorks, you have to make a decision whether a 2D document will be good enough or is 3D a necessity in order to get the most out of your design ideas. A program like eDrawings which SolidWorks offers is a great tool for communicating internally at your company and to your customers but it always has the drawback that whoever you are sending the file to needs to have some sort of a viewer installed in order to see it. This may not be a big deal but it can be to some people. eDrawings is a tool that we use quite frequently at my company but every now and then you run into a situation while using it that hinders the paths of communication.

Over the past couple of months there has been some buzz in the SolidWorks community about a SolidWorks Labs product called Presentation Studio. I have briefly played around with this SolidWorks add on and it looks great but again you need to install additional software and so on. However, this finished project is really nice and it will make your “presentation” stand out from the rest. If you haven’t already tried it, play around with it and see what you think. I personally think that the people in the SolidWorks labs are on to something great here. To see some great reviews of the product check out these links by various members of the “SolidWorks Blog Squad”.

• SolidWorks: Heard! – Episode 183 – Presentation Studio (podcast)
• SolidSmack – SolidWorks Users Crave Useful Add-In. Get Presentation Studio
• Mike Puckett’s Blog – Free 3D PDF Creation Software From SolidWorks Labs

There is also an easy way to create a 3D PDF of you model without installing any additional software and the only prerequisite that the recipient of your file needs in Adobe Reader 8 or newer (I believe Adobe 8 is the cutoff). Most companies have this program already installed on their computer for viewing 2D PDF’s so it won’t be an issue 99% of the time. Now understand, this 3D PDF that you create will be about as plain as they come but it will get your design across. It also includes some hidden functionality that is very nice by using the RMB when viewing the file. Here is what you need to do to create this simple communication file.

1. Open the SolidWorks model that you need to send someone in 3D.

2. Go to File > Save As…

3. In the “Save as type” dropdown you need to select Adobe Portable Document Format (*.pdf). Once this is selected you will have checkbox that appears that says “Save as 3D PDF”. Make sure this is checked otherwise you will get a 2D PDF of your SolidWorks model.

4. Simple as that…you now have a 3D PDF of your model. By looking at the picture below you would think that it is just a 2D picture but you can rotate it around by holding the LMB. To pan in and out you need to hold down the RMB.

You now have a 3D PDF that you can send to your sales department or to a customer to portray your ideas. But the functionality doesn’t end there. By simply clicking on the RMB you will get a list of additional functionality that is available to you. These include the ability to walk around your model, fly around it, show it shaded with edges, etc. etc. etc.

If you would like to see the 3D PDF that I show here you can open it by following this link.

I hope this helps you and your company to communicate better both internally and to your customers.

I have read about all of the great new enhancements in SolidWorks 2009 but sometimes you don’t realize how nice they will be until you actually see them in action. As is the case with the above picture. This morning I was working on a component and had added a feature above the chamfers in my FeatureManager tree. Well it caused some errors with missing references for the chamfers so when I went in to fix them I received this nice preview of what was going on. First you will notice in the graphics window that it is showing the ghost images of where my chamfers used to be along with it being highlighted in the PropertyManager. This is great because it will allow me to quickly delete missing references and re-associate them to new faces or edges (in the case of chamfers or radii).

If you haven’t already switched to SolidWorks 2009 you can download SP1 in the Downloads and Updates page of the SolidWorks Customer Portal as long as you are a subscription customer. To see a list of some of the things that were fixed in SP1 you can check out the Fixed SPR’s page or download the What’s New in SolidWorks 2009 PDF document.

Drop me a comment of other new features that you like even more after seeing them in action.

How many of you have to do a fair amount of dimensional conversion between inches, millimeters and centimeters?

At our company we do all of our modeling in inches but there are a fair amount of our customers that send us hard copy prints that are fully dimensioned in metric units. I would then have to spend some time manually converting these dimension over to inch so that we could model the part correctly. It worked but it ate up time that I could be designing. Well, I found out the other day that there is a easier way to do this without having to go into Tools>Options every time and change my units for that file and then when I was done have to go back in there and change them back to inch units.

You can do it right inside your dimension input boxes while you are sketching/dimensioning. I know there are probably a lot of you that are saying to yourselves right now…he is just finding this out? The answer is yes, I know, I am ashamed but I figured that if I just found this out there may be others out there that don’t know you can do it also. Back to quick conversions, when you add a dimension to a sketch or feature you get a dimension input box as shown on the right. To do your conversion all you need to do is enter in the number you need converted followed by the unit it is currently in (i.e. mm, in, cm) as you can see in the picture below. Simple as that!

About a month ago I made the switch to Windows Vista Ultimate from Windows XP. For the most part I am really happy about making the move but there was one thing that really, I mean really, bothered me with Vista. In Windows Explorer you were forced into having a thumbnail preview of each file as opposed to the SolidWorks icons for parts, assemblies and drawings. Some users like the thumbnail preview but I am not one of them. I like to be able to quickly tell what kind of file I am looking at by just looking at the icon, especially since our assembly file names include nothing to differentiate them from our part file names.

So for a while after I starting using Vista I searched around on the web for a solution to this problem but I quickly found out that I was not the only one that had this pet peeve and no one seemed to know how to correct it. The option that SolidWorks includes it it’s Tools>Options (see below) doesn’t work with Vista so it is something that I just figured I would have to live with. Well, not anymore! I stumbled across the solution today when I was making some performance adjustments and now I am a happy camper.

So here is what you have to do to get those beautiful little icons back in your folders. Right click the Computer icon (or name in your Start menu) and select Properties. From here you will want to select Advanced system settings.

The System Properties window will pop up and you will want to select Settings in the Performance group box.

Once you select that the Performance Options window will appear that has a bunch of different options available to you. You can “Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer”, “Adjust for best appearance”, “Adjust for best performance” or “Custom”. The option that you will want to make sure is UNCHECKED is Show thumbnails instead of icons. Once you select this your choice will automatically switch to “Custom”.

VOILA!

You will now be able to see the plain SolidWorks icons as opposed to all of those small thumbnail previews that you can hardly see anyways. Please note that this is universal for all of your icons however, so your pictures, PDF documents and everything will show a icon instead of the thumbnail but I can handle that if I can get my SolidWorks icons back.

How many of you use the SolidWorks Task Pane? No, I mean really use it. For the first couple of years that I used SolidWorks I didn’t even have it turned on. We didn’t use the Design Library at that time and I never really explored the other features that it had to offer. Since then I have used it almost exclusively in my daily design processes. It is such a hidden tool that I don’t think gets utilized as much as it should. We have 1 guy in our engineering department that NEVER uses it, he doesn’t need to use the Design Library that we have set up and thus he hasn’t looked into many of the other functionality. In this article I want to break down what all of the tabs have to offer and what you can do with each of them. You may have more or less tabs on your Task Pane depending on your SolidWorks product but this will cover the basic Task Pane. The picture above shows the location of the unmovable Task Pane in its standard collapsed state.

Tab #1 – SolidWorks Resources

This tab has all kinds of valuable resources to offer. The first group titled “Getting Started” offers 5 main options. The top 2 are standard SolidWorks buttons; New Document and Open a Document. Both of these can also be found in your ‘File’ pull down menu but if you always start with the Task Pane open like above it is right there for you. Quick, easy access to the 2 commands that you execute 97% of the time you open SolidWorks. The next option is Tutorials which is a link to the 39 tutorials that SolidWorks packaged in your install. These are a great resource for some of those design processes that you don’t do everyday but you run into from time to time. The next option is What’s New. This is a link to the PDF file that is available as each new major release. The first time that you fire up the updated major release (i.e. SolidWorks 2009) you should immediately take some time and browse around the PDF document. It shows you and offers some hands on training off the new features that are included in that release. The last button in the group is General Information which is a link to this web page which is the Technical Support page of SolidWorks.

The next group is titled “Community” and it offers you 4 quick access links to SolidWorks websites. Here are the links:

• Customer Portal – This is the main web page for any SolidWorks user. This is almost anything and everything that you will need in regards to SolidWorks.
• Discussion Forum – This is a great place to help other users out or post a problem that you may be running into and wait for the quick responses that will be coming in to help you out.
• User Groups – These meetings are great for SolidWorks users to network with each other face to face and hear GREAT presentations from some of the leading SolidWorks presenters.
• Latest News – This is a link to ALL of the SolidWorks Corporation RSS Feeds. Check some of them out to stay up to date with what is going on at SolidWorks.

The 3^rd grouping in this pane is called “Online Resources”. This offers some great, quick resources for you to use during the middle of your designs. The first option is a search box to find custom manufacturers. What it does is search the SupplierSource website for whatever entry you put in the search box. This is great to use for the times when you have a part that you know your company can’t manufacture and need to outsource it. The next option is a link to the SolidWorks Partner Solutions website so that you can browse for that perfect add on to your SolidWorks package. The last option in the group is a link to the SolidWorks Labs webpage so that you can keep tabs on what SolidWorks is working on for future add ons and programs.

And finally on the bottom of the SolidWorks Resources tab you will see the Tip of the Day box that is chocked full of tips that you can cycle through. All in all this tab has more useful links than you can shake a stick at. Check it out sometime and you will be amazed at how useful it can become in your daily design processes.

Tab #2 – Design Library

The 2^nd tab from the top is the “Design Library”. It offers you some important and key trees that you can expand. The 1^st tree is the SW Library Features which is the Design Library that you have created for your company or the default one that is given to you with the software. The next tree that is in the list is the Toolbox (which you can see I don’t have activated in my screen shot above). The Toolbox is often used for your standard nuts and bolts and fasteners in general which we don’t include in our assemblies very often. The next tab in the list is the 3D ContentCentral tab which gives you quick and easy access to the supplier and user submitted models. To browse around 3D ContentCentral without having SolidWorks activated you can follow this link. The 4^th and final tree in this list is the SolidWorks Content tab expandable list which provides links to folders that include Blocks, CircuitWorks, Routing and Weldments. I can honestly say that I have never used this list because it doesn’t pertain to our industry but I can definitely see where it would be extremely useful to have this at your fingertips when designing products that use some of these features.

Another key feature of this tab is the toolbar on top of these expandable trees. The first button lets you quickly add an open part to the Design Library. The second button lets you add an entire folder to this tab which is a very nice option (see below). The 3^rd button lets you create the SW Library Features tree and the 4^th button lets you refresh all of these folders.

DESIGN LIBRARY TIP – A trick that I learned at a presentation given by Matthew Cummins was to add the project folder that you are working in to the Design Library tab. This allows you to quickly drag and drop components from that project into your project assembly as you are working on it.

Tab #3 – File Explorer / SolidWorks PDM

This tab is your main tab for file management. Whether you are using either of the SolidWorks PDM programs or not this is your tab to manage your SolidWorks files. There are 3 expandable trees in which ever file management system you are using. The first is Recent Documents which lists the last 9 (at least in my version) documents that you had open. This is nice because I have it quite often that I am switching back and forth between models all day long and I always seem to just close the one that I need to reference next. This is a very handy feature. The next tree is Open in SolidWorks which lists all the the SolidWorks files that you have open. If you don’t like the way that Ctrl+Tab works or you don’t like to always have to go into your pull downs you can access all of your open SolidWorks files right here. The next tree is the Desktop. This acts as a quick way to get to your desktop and whatever files you may have laying around on your machine or in a network location. By using this tree to open files instead of the Open command you can drag components into your assembly straight from this tab. If you are running one of the SolidWorks PDM packages (Workgroup or Enterprise) you will also have access to the Vault from this tab.

FILE EXPLORER TIP – We currently do not use any sort of a PDM software so I like to make sure that I have a shortcut on my desktop to the folder where ALL of our CAD files are located. This way when I expand my Desktop tree I have quick access to all of my CAD files without having to cycle through all of the network locations.

Tab #4 – Search

This tab serves 1 purpose. When you search for a file in the search bar at the top of your SolidWorks window your results are shown in this tab. Quite simple and straight forward!

Tab #5 – View Palette

This tab is only available when you are creating or have created a SolidWorks Drawing file. From this tab you are able to quickly drag views into your drawing from this View Palette. You also have the options at the top of this tab to Import Annotations and Auto-start projected view. We don’t have Drawing templated set up with predefined views because they vary so much from drawing to drawing at our company so I use this tab exclusively when I create drawings. This was one of my favorite new features that came out in SolidWorks 2008.

Tab #6 – Appearances / Scenes

This tab is a new addition in SolidWorks 2009 that enables you to easily add appearances and scenes to your models. Everything in regards to these items has been consolidated into one location which is this tab. Very handy when working with PhotoWorks renderings.

Tab #7 – Custom Properties

This tab is also a new feature in SolidWorks 2009 which is a spot where you can build a custom custom properties form so that you can easily add custom properties to your SolidWorks Parts and Assemblies. As you can see I have not had the time to set this up “officially” yet but I have had the chance to experiment with it and it is AWESOME! I am really looking forward to implementing this at the company that I work at. Of any of the new features in SolidWorks 2009, besides the performance gains, I have heard the most praise for this new tool. Make sure you at least try it out and see what it can offer for your company.

CONCLUSION

The SolidWorks Task Pane is a great tool if it is utilized correctly. If you don’t already use it give it a shot. Try to use it for a couple of weeks and see what you think. You will never know just how much it can benefit you until you use it.

Feel free to drop me a comment if you would like to add anything to this post or if you have a question about the SolidWorks Task Pane.

Today I ran into an issue that became very frustrating while doing some detailing. This is not something that I do every day so when it became a nuisance I had to do something about it.

A while back I had a blog post about customizing the calloutformat.txt file so that the Hole Callout dimensioning tool would work according to your own company standard (who doesn’t have their own little way of dimensioning, right?). When I set this up for my company I made it so that my drill callout would follow the following format – ‘hw-diam’ (hole diameter) DR. This was great but I would have to go in and manually change the decimal dimension for the hole diameter to a fraction and I we would always have to manually type in a drill callout that was either a number drill or a letter drill.

So today I asked the question to some of the SolidWorks “experts” that I know and I quickly got an answer from Jeremy Regnerus who works for SolidWorks. The solution to my problem was quite simple after I saw it and was a little ashamed that I didn’t know it already. Anyways, I thought it would be good to post it so that if anyone else is struggling with the same thing they can fix their file also. So here is how you do it step by step.

1. The first step is to open up SolidWorks and find out where you Hole Callout Format File is. To do this go to Tools > Options > System Options > File Locations > Hole Callout Format File and then see where it says the location of this text file is and shown below.

2. After you figure this out you will need to go to Windows Explorer and find this file as shown below. If you haven’t done so already it is always a good idea to create a copy of this file before you do any modifying to it. Just be sure to name your copy something different than the original and make all of your changes to the original final named calloutformat.txt.

3. Once you open this you are ready to change your Hole Callout standards. If you are using more than 1 Hole Wizard standard you will need to do this to each standard in this file. The name of the standard will be found where the green box is below. As you can see below in the orange boxes, in all of my plain holes (or drill holes) it will dimension it as the diameter of the hole in my standard 3 place decimal. This is where I want it to call out either a fractional drill, number drill or a letter drill.

4. In order to do this all you need to do is change it from calling out the hole diameter (hw-diam) to call out the fastener size (hw-fstsze). Pretty simple huh?

5. That’s it! Now your Hole Callout dimensioning tool will look like it does below depending on your style that you set up. (Thanks to Jeremy for this screen shot.)

Note that you can also change this on a per drawing basis by selecting the Variable button inside the Dimension Text box and then selecting Fastener Size. This will insert the fastener size into your callout for this dimension ONLY!

CONCLUSION

Disaster averted! My stress level decreased rapidly today after I got this figured out and I soon became the hero of our design group when I filled them in on what I had fixed in our system files.

Thanks again Jeremy for helping me out with this and also to Jim Byrne who helped me out but just a touch after Jeremy sent a reply back.

Over the past 4 weeks I have been working on a rather large progressive die assembly for my company so much to my delight I quickly picked up on a tool that Jeremy Regnerus of SolidWorks Corp. mentioned in passing at our July 15 WMSWUG meeting.

How many of you have ever had to make a quick update in an assembly but the assembly was so huge that it took you longer to open the assembly than to actually make the change. Here is where the tip comes in, you can actually load a “preview” of the model and actually select only the parts in the assembly that you need to work on. What this does is only load those parts that you selected into memory and everything else is just there. All of your mates stay intact during this process but the components aren’t bogging down your system. Here is how you accomplish this.

Step 1: File>Open and browse to the assembly that you need to work in and single click it.

Step 2: Check the box at the bottom of the window that says Quick View/Selective Open

Step 3: Notice that the now there is a popup that appears in the upper left hand corner of your work window that lets you select either to open the Selected components or All components displayed (using display states and show/hide).

Step 4 (Only if you checked Selected components in Step 3): Ctrl select the components that you need to work on either in the working window or in the feature manager tree and then click the Open Selected button in the Selective Open popup window.

Step 5: Another popup window will then appear that notifies you that when ever you decide to show an additional component from here on out it may take longer to show these components because it is actually loading that component into memory at that point.

Step 6: Now you have only the components loaded into memory that you selected in Step 4.

Once again I want to thank Jeremy for pointing this out to me and the other attendees at our SWUG meeting.

Do you have the need or desire to show components in your assembly templates? Well you can but it may not be as easy as you think. SolidWorks seems to be doing a really good at making sure that your assembly templates are completely empty other than some reference geometry.

To start off SolidWorks does not allow you to make a template that references another template already. For example you can not have an assembly template with a part in it the was created from a part template, some sort of a cross reference there I guess. So here is how you can work around this issue.

Step 1: Open Assembly and mate in components as you desire
Step 2: Save completed Assembly as an assembly file (.sldasm)
Step 3: Rename completed Assembly to the file extension for your Assembly templates (.asmdot)
Step 4: Move renamed Assembly into your Document Templates folder

Now you will be able to use this template like the others that you already have set up. However, there are a few drawbacks that I have seen. The first is that when you go to save that template it does not automatically switch to the .sldasm extension but instead you have to manually switch it, which can become a nuisance if you are used to the way that the other template react. The other is that it always puts you in the folder where the template is stored so you need to cycle through more files in order to save it off into the correct location.

Try it out for yourself to see if it fixes what ails you. Also, if you have other workarounds for this same issue please share, I would love to hear them.

How much time in a day do you spend clicking through files in File Explorer? Sometimes this process can be more painful than being a certain ex major league baseball pitcher right now. Well there is a way to make this a little better if you are working in the same folder or series of folders for an extended period of time. For those of you that use the Design Library on a regular basis you may already be aware of the method to add a folder to the Design Library tab in the Task Manager. In Tools>System Options>File Locations you can set the location of your Design Library but there may be another folder that you don’t want to be included in the Design Library but you still want a spot where you can have quick and easy access to a certain file or folder. Well here is a trick to accomplish this that Matthew Cummins shared at the WMSWUG meeting in March during his presentation.

The first step is to expand the Task Manager tab in User Interface.

After you have done this select the Icon that looks like 3 library books with a star above them and then browse to the folder that you would like added to the Design Library tab and select “Open”.

Now the folder you just added should be in the lineup of items already in the Design Library tab. This folder will now act as Design Library folder and features act by allowing you to drag an item from that folder into your work area and drop multiple instances of the same component at a time.

You can delete these files just as easy by right clicking and select “Delete”. This will delete the folder from this tab but NOT from your hard drive or network location.